


Two by Two, Hands of Blue

by masterwords



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Aaron Hotchner Whump, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Graphic Description, Humiliation, Hurt Aaron Hotchner, Hurt/Comfort, Past Abuse, Prison, Protective David Rossi, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:41:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29672286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterwords/pseuds/masterwords
Summary: A re-imagining of the prison storyline from Seasons 12/13, but with Hotch instead of Spence.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 38





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I don't know why I'm taking on such a huge thing here, but I decided to and there is no turning back. This is all posted to Tumblr as well. This is a re-imagining of the prison storyline, it isn't just Hotch cut and pasted into Spencer's so it'll be very different...just, what might it have looked like if it had been Hotch? My wheels got to turning.

“Hey, mister? Are you alright?”

He could hear the words, but they didn’t register. They had a faraway quality, like hearing something on a television in another room. The person repeated themselves, and he finally turned his head, inclined just slightly, and narrowed his eyes in the direction the voice was coming from. Darkness was all he could see, the metallic tang of blood overwhelming his senses. His hands hurt, they hurt so bad and he didn’t know why. Lifting them to his face, he tried to peer through the dark, tried to focus on his fingers, all he saw was blood, but that didn’t make sense. 

“I called 9-1-1, buddy. You just stay put.” 

Red and blue lights swirled around the scene, and he just let himself be pulled up, off of his knees. They said the blood on his hands was someone else’s, they put him in handcuffs and shoved him into the back of a car. The pain in his hands was almost unbearable, and he was sure the blood must have been his own, there wasn’t anyone else there. When they asked his name, it took him too long, but they found his credentials, and they looked horrified, they whispered, they knew who he was. He wished someone would just explain to him what was going on. 

It took hours before he registered what was happening, and with the burgeoning clarity also came a throbbing headache and chills, akin to the worst illness he’d ever had. He was draped over a cold metal table in a police interrogation room, his hands still bound in his lap, a mess of angry, gruesome swelling and blood. The handcuffs were getting tighter, cutting off circulation as the swelling in his wrists became more pronounced. His cheek rested against the cool metal, his heart thundering in his chest like he’d just run a marathon, and he waited. He knew he was being watched, he knew how this went, but his body and his mind were not on the same plane of existence so all of his vast knowledge meant nothing for him. 

“Agent Hotchner?”

He tried to sit up, tried to force his muscles to work for him. They did no such thing, so he groaned instead and the officer swooped around the table and, using the back of his shirt collar, hefted him upright. Aaron forced his eyes open, blinked stupidly at the man and let his too heavy head fall forward again. With his chin against his chest, his back muscles pulled painfully tight between his shoulders, the detective began railing off question after question and his mind couldn’t keep up. His mouth was dry, too dry, his lips wouldn’t even part without some considerable effort. The detective left the room briefly and came back with another man and a glass of water which he smacked down in front of Aaron. The other man, presumably the good cop, lifted the glass of water and put it to Aaron’s lips, helped him drink. He couldn’t see either of them, but the water helped, washed down the thick dry feeling in his mouth, the sick in his throat. 

“Thank you,” he mumbled, and in his head it sounded correct but it was barely intelligible. 

“We’re not gonna get anything out of him for a while yet,” the good cop said, helping him sip water again. They started to leave the room, started to walk away, and Aaron wanted to cry out, to beg them to let him out of the cuffs, but he just let his head fall back to the table and closed his eyes. The room got colder, he felt the change, felt the chills get worse but his head cleared and his voice came back to him. He started practicing words slowly, forming his name silently, simple words, regaining his faculties. 

“You ready to talk now Agent?” the bad cop asked, storming into the room. Aaron was able to sit up on his own this time, and he leveled his gaze at the cop, blinking slowly. The good cop came in after, and though Aaron understood how this worked, he still tried to appeal to him. Slowly, he hefted his hands up and onto the table, slamming them down painfully for effect and he watched the way the good cop almost seemed to recoil from the sight and fumble for the keys to the cuffs. 

“Shit,” he murmured under his breath, pushing the key into the lock and releasing the cuffs as quickly as he could. “We need to get someone in here.”

“He’s the prime suspect in a murder, Davis, we’re not getting anyone in here. He can rot.”

“Looks like his hand is broken…god, look at it…” Good cop, Davis, looked like he was going to be sick. Aaron shrugged, his hands were almost numb now from lack of circulation, but he did have to admit they looked gruesome and his left hand definitely felt broken, which was a little upsetting since he was left handed but he couldn’t worry about that now. The status of the right hand was still up in the air, it was completely numb. A blessing, really. 

“You got anything to say for yourself?” bad cop was back to talking now, and he wasn’t at all bothered by Aaron’s hands. Might even try using them to his advantage if he didn’t start talking soon.

“I don’t even know why I’m here.” 

Bad cop smiled and slapped a few gory photos down on the table in front of Aaron, hoping for some kind of a response maybe, but he’d seen too many photos like this in his time. It was cute the way they tried, though. 

“You think I did this?”

“You didn’t?”

“No.” 

“So then tell me why you were found beside the body, with his blood all over your hands. That isn’t all your blood, Agent Hotchner. Looks an awful lot like this, don’t you think?”

The next photos that ended up in front of him made the bile rise in his throat, and he couldn’t hide it. He hadn’t ever looked at a photo of Foyet, of what he’d done to him. His mind had locked that away, locked it up tight. 

“Just about identical, eh? Seems like you got…oh, hey Davis, what do these profilers call it? A signature?”

“Yeah,” Davis said, but he’d been derailed, made useless by the sight of Aaron’s hands afraid they’d get in trouble for not taking care of it, for putting him in cuffs as long as they did. All the better. “Somethin’ like that…you sure we don’t need to have him checked out, McKay?”

“We’ll get him checked out when he tells us why he seems to leave a trail of pulverized skulls in his wake, huh?”

“Am I under arrest?”

“You sure as hell are,” and McKay launched into his recitation of Aaron’s rights, like he’d been waiting for the moment that Aaron was lucid enough to understand them. Truth be told, he had. He was already convinced of guilt – you didn’t just turn up beside a body with a broken skull, your hands busted up and covered in the victim’s blood and then somehow turn out innocent. Not in his mind anyway. This was a cut and dry case so far as he was concerned. 

“Jessica?” Aaron asked, leaning heavily against the wall while Officer Davis held the phone to his ear. He’d tried to hold the phone but he couldn’t make his fingers work, the phone just fell off the hook and clattered against the wall. Having the officer beside him while he called was less than ideal, it was why he phoned Jessica instead of Dave directly. 

“Aaron is that you?” she asked, yawning the sleep out of her voice. It was 3am, she’d barely even decided to answer the phone except that 3am phone calls were almost always emergencies. 

“Jessica, I don’t have much time. I’m in trouble, I need you to call Dave…please do not call anyone else. Keep Jack safe.” He gave her a phone number and a name, begged her not to tell anyone else, to let Dave handle it. 

“Aaron, are you okay?” She knew he wasn’t, she could hear it in his voice. He wouldn’t give her specifics, he never did, he always shielded her from the ugly the way he had Haley but she knew. She wasn’t as trusting as Haley, she didn’t believe Aaron Hotchner was some infallible superhero, she knew he could hurt and she always saw it. 

“No. Please just call Dave, right now.” 

Her phone call to Dave was frantic, and she kept her bedroom door closed so Jack wouldn’t hear her. He was hyper aware of noises, a light sleeper, and it was getting worse the older he got. She spoke in a hushed whisper, told Dave everything she knew, what she could hear in the background, how he sounded. Dave wanted every detail, every word as he spoke them, before thanking her and telling her to go back to sleep. As if I could, she thought bitterly. She had to figure out how to tell Jack his dad wouldn’t be home in the morning without rousing his suspicion, and that was going to take some doing. He was still too young to really understand or process these things, the ugly side of what his father did and ended up mixed up in. She was sure, though, that whatever it was would be resolved soon because Aaron didn’t do things that would get him into this kind of trouble. Did he? 

Aaron was booked in, scrubbed down and suited up before he saw a doctor about his hands. 

“You really did a number on yourself here,” the doctor said, cleaning him up and bandaging him the best he could with his limited resources. They were already in the process of filing charges, so he knew he wouldn’t be sitting in jail long, they could do more for him later, if they were so inclined. “How’d this happen?”

“I don’t know,” Aaron replied, and it was the truth. He had no memory of anything, though the photos were compelling. He had to admit that they had enough evidence to make a solid case, he just had to believe that Dave would come through for him. They put him in a holding cell with two other men, and he sat himself in the corner and hung his head between his legs, just trying his best to keep to himself, not to look like a cop, not to get into any trouble.

Trouble always managed to find him, though. 

“You a cop? You look like a cop.”

“Not a cop.” Aaron looked up at the man speaking, a small rat faced man with a bloody lip and nervous eyes. 

“You look like a cop.”

Aaron slid further into the corner, but kept his eyes on the two men. He didn’t want trouble, it wouldn’t serve him but he would fight back, that he knew. The moment he was discovered as a fed, he was in trouble, and it would do him no favors to go in with a target on his back and looking weak. He would have a choice to make, he just hoped it wouldn’t be tonight. Rat Face left him alone after that, but the other man, a tall lanky man who looked like he was made of cobwebs and soot, all pale and gray, was staring at him now. 

“I know you,” he whispered, and Aaron thought he could see dust where teeth should have been. He blinked, thought he was seeing things. 

“You don’t.” 

“I do, I know who you are…I’ve seen you in the papers…” Cobweb slid closer to him, staring at him with glassy, cataract filled eyes. “I know you.”

“He’s a cop, ain’t he?” Rat Face said, and Cobweb turned slowly toward him, smiling that dusty smile.

“Not a cop,” Cobweb replied, and he winked at Aaron, watching the way the color seemed to drain from his features. The blood in Aaron’s veins turned to ice.


	2. Chapter 2

“Flight risk?? You’ve got to be kidding me!” Dave was yelling in his office at 5am. The sound echoed through the walls in the empty building, and he didn’t care if security came flying up to his office to see what the matter was, he was outraged. His checkbook sat open on his desk, waiting for an amount, and now he was being met with a brick wall. They were refusing him bail on the basis that Aaron had too many high level connections around the world, and because the Bureau was going to provide his legal defenses, he was deemed a flight risk. “He’s a highly decorated Federal Agent! He’s spent his life dedi-”

“Agent Rossi, this is not up for debate. You may come and see him today, before he’s taken and booked into Millburn Correctional, it’s the best I can do for you. I’m already putting my ass on the line giving you that much.”

“Millburn! He’s an FBI Agent, they’ll kill him in there! Why isn’t he getting protective custody?”

“I can appreciate your concern for your colleague, but we have our own problems to deal with – overcrowding being one. It’s a countrywide problem.”

“He can’t be in Gen Pop, he put a lot of those guys away! This is criminal negligence.” 

“I can get you an hour with him at 1pm, before he’s scheduled to be transported. Are you able to make it, or is this conversation over?.”

“Yes, put me on your books. You’ll be hearing from the Bureau about this.” 

“Agent Rossi, with all due respect, you need to remember he’s being charged with murder – you’re not in a position to throw your weight around.” 

“We’ll see about that,” Rossi huffed and abruptly ended the call. He stalked around his office, not sure what to do with himself. He’d been up all night making calls, setting up Aaron’s defense, and now he had to wait hours before he could even see his friend – he had no idea the condition he was in, except the mug shot forwarded to him and the crime scene photos he’d demanded. He wasn’t going to let Garcia intercept these, he needed to run point on this one. For the next two hours, until the team started trickling in, he began assembling all of the information he had, putting together files for his team – he knew they’d want to be involved but he also knew he shouldn’t be asking them to. 

“Sir?” Garcia asked, standing in Dave’s doorway, still in her jacket. “I…I saw…”

“Get everyone to the round table immediately. Please.” He sounded hoarse, exhausted, she could see it in his eyes. 

He’d never walked into the room to silence before. All eyes were on Rossi, and while he was no stranger to the spotlight, in this instance it made his skin crawl. 

“What we’re about to discuss is confidential, and us even discussing it is probably a violation of Bureau policy. Last night, Hotch was arrested for murder. I know, I know, please no comments…it looks bad. In the file I made for each of you, you can see the crime scene photos.”

“It looks just like Foyet,” Reid chimed in, eyes wide, staring at the photo. Paper-clipped to the top was Aaron’s mugshot, with his glassy eyes and sunken cheeks. He looked like death. “Was he drugged?”

“They’re awaiting toxicology reports, but I think you all know what my guess is…”

“Scopalomine.” 

“Do we think this is Peter Lewis?” Tara chimed in, flipping through the report. There wasn’t much in the file, but they didn’t need a file to profile Aaron or Peter Lewis. Dave nodded, but he didn’t look certain. 

“The way he’s targeted Aaron over the years, my instinct says yes, but we can’t jump to conclusions. His defense team is going to be digging through his life, they’ve got an uphill battle proving his innocence with these pictures as evid - “ he was cut off by Garcia gasping.

“Sir,” she whispered, turning the screen of her PDA toward Rossi with wide eyes. “They found another body, same…same cause of death. Oh God.” 

“As I was saying,” Dave continued, forcing his eyes away from the screen. He felt sick, his hands were shaking. “This is not our case. Not officially. Anyone who chooses to join me will be doing so on their own time, not bureau time. You could face significant discipline if you’re found out. There is no obligation for any of you to help me, and I know Aaron would tell you all to focus on your cases and not on him – but I would gladly accept help from any of you that are willing.” 

Everyone in the room sat in silent reflection for a long time, contemplating what it meant for them to get involved. Or to not get involved. 

“I would rather offer my services to the defense team,” Tara said with a nod. “I think I would be more helpful in an official capacity, and it may afford me face time with him that you won’t have access to otherwise. You all know him personally, I don’t have that relationship with him, so I would prefer to make sure my contribution is both helpful and also one that he would be comfortable with.”

“Understood,” Dave said with an appreciative nod. He had been expecting that answer from Tara, and was glad to hear it. Luke offered to take on more BAU case loads in lieu of digging into his new boss’ private life, hopefully giving them more time to do what they needed to do for Hotch. 

“I’ll do whatever you need, whatever you ask,” he said, nodding. “I just don’t know him that well and I don’t think he’d want me all up in his business.” 

“That’s fair,” Dave replied, smiling. “I’m not asking anyone to do more than what they’re comfortable with. Officially I’m not asking anyone to do…anything.”

“So are you our acting Unit Chief?” Reid asked, addressing the elephant in the room. Dave shook his head quickly, dispelling any thought that he might take that on. 

“No, absolutely not. I was asked, given my seniority, but I made a recommendation that was accepted by the Section Chief instead. If she would consent to taking on the workload, my recommendation was Jennifer.”

Everyone turned to JJ, who seemed blindsided but she smiled. Tucking a chunk of hair behind her ear, she glanced around the room, feeling her breath catch in her throat for a moment, trying to read everyone’s reactions. To her surprise, everyone seemed accepting of the recommendation. “I, uh…yeah. Okay. Yeah.” 

“We’ll all be right here to help you,” Dave said. “And…I don’t think you should get involved with Aaron’s case.”

“No, Rossi, I need to help…” she pleaded, but he shook his head. 

“I’d like you to help Jessica with Jack. That’s the most important job, and it’s one that you won’t get in any trouble for doing. The reality is, we might not get him out of there, and even if we do, it’s not going to happen overnight. Jack is his reason to live.” 

JJ gulped and felt tears welling up in her eyes, she hadn’t even gotten to the point where she’d considered Jack. Looking around the room, it seemed that everyone else was right there with her. The air was stifling, no one knew what to say or how to look at one another. 

“I’m going to see him at 1 today, I’ll be in touch after that.” He couldn’t be in the room any longer, he had to get out, so he excused himself and walked back to his office on legs that were barely able to carry him. He had a few hours to kill before he could go and see his friend, and he was finding it challenging to turn his mind toward anything else. Garcia came through with a coffee and a croissant for him, but she was so in distress that she didn’t even say a word, just breezed in, forced a smile, and left. Everyone was quiet the rest of the morning as they figured out what they were supposed to do next. 

Jessica had no idea what to say to Jack when he came into the kitchen asking where his dad was. She just stared at him, stared and tried not to cry. He knew instantly, of course, because he was his father’s son and he could read people.

“What happened?” he asked, leaning on the counter. “Is he okay?” 

“I…I think he is.” Wrong answer, she knew instantly, but looking into his face, the face that looked so damn much like her sister’s, she just couldn’t lie. “He’s been arrested, but he didn’t do anything wrong and Dave is already working on getting him out. Okay? Don’t worry.”

“Do you know he didn’t do anything wrong?” Jack asked, and something flashed across his face so fast she almost missed it. There was a darkness there that she’d never seen before and it frightened her. 

“Yes…yes, Jack, I do. Your dad wouldn’t hurt anyone.” 

“They said he hurt someone?”

“Can we um…can we talk about this later? You need to get to school.” She’d botched that one up, she already knew it. Everything was wrong with the conversation and she just stood, staring down her nephew, wishing she could turn back time and start over.

“Is it on the news?” he asked, and she froze. She had no idea, hadn’t even thought to look. “If it’s on the news, I don’t want to go. Last time he got arrested all the kids knew and wouldn’t stop talking about it.” 

“I…I don’t know…”

“Well I’m not going to school today.” And that was that, he stormed back to his bedroom and slammed the door behind him. She walked to the front room and sunk down into the couch with the weight of it all on her shoulders, and finally let herself cry. 

The interrogation room was cold, too cold even for Dave. He pulled his jacket close around him and reclined in the stiff chair, waiting for them to bring Aaron in. They were late, and he was marking the minutes, he was promised an hour and he would get his hour or else. He was in no mood to deal with their games. Locks clicked and metal banged against metal, Dave glanced at his watch and noted that they’d stolen nearly fifteen minutes of his time when they ushered Aaron in, looking like death warmed over. 

“You got until 2,” the guard said, shoving Aaron heavily into his seat. Dave shook his head, standing up as if he could intimidate a guard twice his size.

“I have until 2:15. I was here on time, and I won’t be robbed because you’re incompetent. I was told I had an hour and I will have it.” 

“Dave,” Aaron whispered, and it sent a shiver up Dave’s spine. “Please.”

The guard didn’t say another word, and Dave was sure he’d try to come back in at 2 anyway, so he just sat down across from Aaron and stared at him. Took in the sight of his friend, the bandages on his hands and the way he gingerly cradled them in his lap. They’d removed his cuffs just before bringing him in, but his feet were chained. Dave felt sick at the sight. 

“How are you?” he asked, because he couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. He had so much on his mind but he hadn’t been prepared for the sight of Aaron in custody like this. 

“Tired.” His voice was so quiet, so subdued. So broken. Dave wondered when he’d last slept, by the looks of it, he’d guess days. “How is Jack?”

“I’m heading there when I’m done here, Aaron. He’s still with Jessica, and I’ve asked JJ to help her out. Jack is taken care of.” 

“Does he know?” The sound of his voice was haunting, it was so quiet, so whisper thin, so faraway. 

“I don’t know what Jessica told him, I’m sorry. I’ll head right over there when I’m done here, Aaron, I promise. Please try not to worry, just focus on staying safe. They told me they’re taking you to Millburn, they’re not putting you into protective custody. Overcrowding bullshit. You need to keep your head down and stay out of trouble, Aaron.” 

“I’m already in trouble,” Aaron whispered, closing his eyes. Cobweb knew who he was, and he was on the bus to Millburn that same afternoon. Aaron hadn’t figured him out, but he believed everything the man had said. “Please keep Jack safe.” It was all he could think about. He knew what he was in for once he got on that bus, he couldn’t think about it too much or he’d get worked up, so he was doing everything in his power to just focus on Jack. 

“Aaron, we will get you out of here,” Dave said, leaning forward. He could hear it in Aaron’s voice, he’d already given up. Maybe it was just his exhaustion, Dave hoped he’d snap out of it and start fighting but right now, he was worried. “You need to help us. Give me some direction. Tell me where to start looking.”

“Dave, I can’t remember…anything. The last thing I remember is leaving work on Friday, I said goodnight to you and got my car and then I was waking up here, handcuffed and covered in blood. How can I not remember breaking my hand, Dave? What…I don’t…I can’t...” he looked at Dave, made eye contact for the first time, and the pain there almost brought Dave to his knees. Aaron believed he could have done it, that much was certain, Dave could see it. 

“You didn’t do this,” Dave said sternly. Maybe too forceful, but he needed Aaron to fight it. To get mad. “You did not kill anyone.” Aaron just nodded and cast his eyes back down toward the table. He wasn’t so sure. “You don’t get to give up, do you hear me?” 

“I’m not, I just…” Aaron searched Dave’s face for mercy. He received it, Dave softened up and nodded. “I’m just so tired.”

Dave decided the rest of their time was better spent visiting about anything else, so he started to tell Aaron that JJ would be taking on his role, that the team was thinking about him and loved him, told him about a few cases that were on his desk awaiting consult. He asked Aaron for advice, to get his mind working on something else, and he smiled when he looked at the clock and saw that the guard had, in fact, given him his extra fifteen minutes. They weren’t allowed to hug goodbye, and Dave left with tears in his eyes with the heavy realization that this was the best condition he was likely to see Aaron in for a long while, he knew each time it would be just a little bit worse, and a little bit harder to say goodbye. 

“I want to stay at Michael’s house tonight,” Jack announced, entering the front room just before dinner time. Jessica was busy cooking and stopped to look at him, eyes wide. She’d already visited with Dave, and was still processing what he told her. “What’s wrong?”

“I…I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jack. We need to talk.” 

The conversation was everything she had wanted to avoid, she was mostly honest with Jack about the situation, keeping the gory details to herself but he was a smart kid and he’d probably already looked it all up online anyway. Still, hearing it from her she knew was how it needed to be, she couldn’t ask him to trust her if she wasn’t honest with him. 

“I still want to go to Michael’s,” he said, when she finished. He ignored everything she said. He’d already made up his mind, and he wouldn’t be told no. He was frightening her a little. 

“No, Jack, not tonight. Okay? Your dad’s being framed for murder…” 

“How do you know? Why do you always believe him and defend him?! What if he did do it? Did you ever think about that?”

She stood, mouth hanging open, unable to form words. She’d expected him to rebel, to be angry, but never to believe his dad would hurt someone. “No, Jack…I’ve known your father since I was your age, he wouldn’t do this.”

“I’m going to Michael’s house tonight.” Before she could react, she realized he already had his backpack slung over his shoulder and he was storming toward the door.

“Jack!” she cried out, but he was already slamming the door behind him. It took her a minute to fumble with the door, to get it open and she followed him down the hallway, reaching for his backpack to pull him back, but he was so fast. They ran out onto the street, but he was so far out of reach and there was already a car waiting for him. Her heart stopped as she saw the passenger door open right before he got there, she couldn’t make anyone out, just a hand in a blue glove, and she screamed his name one more time before the door closed and the car sped off. Frantically, she dialed Dave’s number.


	3. Chapter 3

He'd never had occasion to ride on a real school bus before. 

When he was a child, he walked to school with a pack of kids, rushing through their wooded shortcuts, picking up more and more kids as they neared the school, wondering if they'd be missed if they just stayed outside for a little longer. It was almost always Aaron who begged to stay in the sunlight, whipping his friends with tall stalks of grass, inventing games that were hard to pass up because he didn't want to go into the school. 

He envied the parents who had the time to volunteer for field trips and got to ride the bus with their kids, who were afforded the opportunity to complain about how rowdy the children were on the bus. He'd never volunteered for any of Jack's field trips, he couldn't commit to being available. He remembered Haley going with Jack’s preschool to the zoo, to the park, to the museum, and she would complain about the food and the kids not sitting still and how exhausting it was, but he wouldn’t have minded it - just once. 

That his first experience on something even resembling a school bus was in shackles on his way to prison, seated beside a man who he knew already wanted his blood must have been some kind of poetic justice in someone's book . He stared out the window, watched as the last trees he'd be laying eyes on for a very long time passed him by in a blur of greens and yellows, some just barely tipped with orange as summer gave way to autumn. Jack would be twelve soon, days now maybe, he’d lost track of time. He remembered his twelfth birthday, Sean was two and had managed to get into the cake his mother had baked that morning. Put his chubby little hand right into the middle of it, dragging all of the chocolate and sprinkles and handwritten letters with it, and no one knew because he'd managed to lick himself clean, so proud of himself and his accomplishment. When the cake was pulled out of the pantry for his birthday dinner, his mother was mortified, and Aaron knew it was an awful thing to do but he exploded. He remembered yelling terrible things, things that were true, things that were untrue, letting loose years of crude anger on his mother, because he couldn't very well yell at Sean. Resent him, sure, he resented the hell out of him but you can't yell at a toddler. He remembered his mother crying, apologizing, promising to bake him another cake, and then his father came in – heard him hollering from all the way in the shed. The way he stormed in like he was dragging the four horsemen behind him - 

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty!” a voice bellowed from nearby and Aaron opened his eyes, hadn't even realized he'd drifted off, his head resting against the window. By his count, he hadn't slept in four days, it could have been longer, but this wasn't the place for it. He straightened himself up and waited to be hauled to his feet and out the door, they seemed to enjoy dragging him around. 

He couldn't believe he'd missed the last of the trees. 

“When can we visit him?” Penelope asked, barging into Dave's office. He'd been on the phone and he shushed her, indicated for her to have a seat, and continued his conversation. On the other end of the line was Aaron's lead defense attorney, the only one assigned by the Bureau, but Dave had a team he was paying for out of his own pocket working under her. If they wouldn't let him post bail, he'd pay legal fees out the nose – what good was having all of this money if you couldn't use it to do something worthwhile? Mansions and cars were well and good, but they meant nothing when compared to friendship and family and Aaron was both to him. Penelope tried not to eavesdrop, but the conversation sounded just awful and she couldn't help it – they were talking about the prison, how to keep him protected, what they needed to accomplish by the end of the week, how he should plead. When the call ended, she felt spent and she hadn't even done any talking. 

“I'm sorry, Garcia, what did you need?” he asked, and she noted how very tired he looked. 

“Have you slept?” she asked, ignoring her previous question for the time being. He shrugged, and rubbed at his eyes. 

“I'll sleep when he can sleep,” was his reply and it almost crushed her. She nodded, somehow she understood. “What did you come in here for? I know it wasn't worry for me.”

“No, sir, I'm sorry...I just wanted to know when we can go see him. I can't stand just sitting here knowing he's all alone.” 

“He's being transported right now, he's...” he paused as his phone rang again, it was Jessica. “Excuse me a moment.” 

She didn't move, though, she wanted to know when she could see Hotch and she was going to wait until she had an answer even if it took all day. The look on Dave's face, the way the color seemed to drain from his features, she feared the worst. 

“He's gone? What do you mean he's gone?” She didn't know what that meant, but it sounded scary. She smoothed her skirt out over her thighs nervously, anchoring herself to the seat. Her refusal to leave brought him comfort as he listened to Jessica frantically tell him what happened with Jack, the awful things he said, the car. She'd managed to remember that it had Mississippi plates but she couldn't remember the numbers because she'd been so thrown by the sight of the bright blue glove, like medical gloves. She kept a box at her home, for taking care of her father, but who wore medical gloves in their car? 

“He said he was going to his friend's house? Michael was it? And you don't know any Michael? Stay where you are in case he comes home, he's a kid, this is a lot for him, he could just be blowing off some steam. We don't know anything is wrong yet.” He eased Jessica's mind, but he was worried. That Jack could think his father was capable of something awful was a concept he hadn't even considered, the kid had always looked at his father with hero worship but he was growing up and things change. 

“What...what was that?” Penelope asked as Dave hung up the phone and sighed. 

“Just another nail in my coffin...” he muttered, shaking his head. “Jack's run off with a friend that Jessica doesn't know, and she's worried. He was upset, said some pretty damning things about Aaron,” he couldn't finish it. He was at his limit. “I'll let you know as soon as I find anything out about visitation.” She knew that was it, and he needed her to leave so with a halfhearted smile, she stood and left him alone in his office. She tried desperately not to look at Hotch's office when she stepped out onto the catwalk, but she couldn't help herself. 

***

There was something unexpected and altogether unnerving about a door closing behind you that you know you have no power to open again. You are entirely at the mercy of others. Aaron had always struggled with his anxiety when he walked into prisons, every single time, no matter how many times he'd done it. The knowledge that he no longer held control over where he was, whether he could come or go, left him on edge – and yet that couldn't compare to the overwhelming panic that was settling into his stomach as he watched the bars close in front of his face, trapping him in a cage. He hadn't looked at his cell-mate yet, couldn't bear it, he just stared at the guard locking him in, swallowing every bit of fear he was able. 

“You don't have to stand there like that,” came a voice from behind him. “They’re not gonna be impressed, String Bean.” 

Aaron turned around slowly, peering through the dim light and watched as his cell mate sat up on his bed. The man looked older than Aaron, how much he couldn't tell – he was entirely gray, and his face had the look of dusty, burnt leather. Still, prison had a way of changing a man, aging him beyond his years. He had tattoos covering most of his neck, faded gray things with harsh white scars running through them. Aaron stared at him for a moment, mindlessly rubbing his forefinger and thumb as he tried to get his bearings. 

“Come on buddy, you're gonna have to do better than that if you wanna survive in here. Sit down.” 

Aaron sat, because he didn't know what else to do. He couldn't wrap his mind around the simple fact that he had been locking these men up for his entire professional life, and now he was sitting right there with them. More irony, he supposed, and at that moment he decided that he'd never liked irony. 

“You got a name?”

“No.”

“You a tough guy?”

“No,” Aaron said, softer this time. He took a deep breath and let his eyes meet those of his cell mate, realizing that the man didn't appear aggressive, and he wasn't familiar. He would need to cool his jets and make more friends than enemies. “Sorry.”

“My name's Jack,” the man said, and Aaron felt his heart thunder in his chest. He nodded, tried to hide his visceral reaction. “But you can call me Scales. You sure you got no name?”

“Aaron,” he said, finally. He'd ask about the nickname later, he was too tired to put in the effort but it sounded interesting and maybe a little frightening. 

“Pleasure to meet you, Aaron. You got a story? Everyone in here's got a story...I like to hear 'em all, I been in here so long it reminds me that there's more outside these walls.” 

“I'm so tired,” Aaron said, letting his head fall into his hands. He'd already memorized his schedule and he knew he had two hours before mealtime. “Mind if I try to sleep a bit first?” He wasn't sure he'd be able to sleep, he might never sleep again, but he'd rather try and fail than waste the opportunity. 

“Sure thing, I got nothing but time. Look forward to hearing your story.”

***

“You can visit him tomorrow, Penelope,” Dave announced, poking his head into her office. She spun around in her chair and smiled, it was the first smile she could remember all day. “You'll be the first. I'm going to rely on you to visit him a lot. His lawyer and I discussed who should be allowed to visit and who shouldn't, based on appearance...we need to keep a low profile, no one who looks like a Fed, you know what I mean? And you...well...”

“Oh, sir! I understand and I've never been happier to hear someone say that. I'll go every day. Can I go every day? Is that allowed?” 

“I don't know all of the rules yet, but we'll make sure you get in as often as possible. I appreciate your enthusiasm, Penelope. You're helping more than you know by just...being you.” He was too drained to elaborate, but he would...later. Without Penelope's sunshine, he would be lost. The image of Aaron in chains, the far away ghostly look on his face, it was haunting him more than he'd let on. 

“Sir? I...did a thing...” she said, wringing her hands. He raised an eyebrow, felt some concern settle in his chest. Now is not the time, he thought bitterly. 

“What...thing?”

“Well, when you told me about Jack...I thought maybe we could use some extra help. We've got so much to do to try and get Hotch help, and now with Jack...I just thought...some extra eyes and hands might be good. So I made some calls...”

“You...made some calls?” He rubbed at his temples, feeling the nagging headache he'd been drowning in ibuprofen and coffee for days now rearing its ugly head again. 

“Sir, I called Emily and Derek. Emily is going to be on the first flight here...and Derek is already on his way to Hotch's house to talk to Jessica. I hope you don't mind, I know I should have talked to you first I just...I thought the more the merrier, and they love Hotch too and you shouldn't have to be doing this all by yourself.”

Dave sighed, it was a long, shaky sigh of pure relief. Of all the things she could have said, he didn’t suppose she could ever understand how very welcome her words were. “Thank you Penelope. Thank you.” 

***

Standing in line in the mess hall, waiting for a meal he didn't want, Aaron could feel eyes on him from all directions. Scales stood behind him, acting as a sort of protective shield, or so he hoped. The smell was overwhelming, like foul meat and grease and powdered potatoes, the kind you buy in a box and cover in a gallon of gravy just to hide the flavor. The last time he’d eaten them was in boarding school, and the familiar odor turned his stomach. 

“You gotta eat,” Scales told him as they took a seat at a table near the door filled with other leathery old men. Aaron nodded, picking up his spork with his right hand, it was difficult and painful but he couldn't use his left hand for anything. He regarded it curiously – he couldn't remember the last time he'd used one. It was such an odd thing, a spork. Useful but odd. Scales dug in, and the rest of the men at the table shoveled their food into their mouths as fast as they could. Aaron felt sick, but he forced in as much as he could muster, starting with the watery potato mess covered in chipped bits of meat and gravy. The green beans were mushy and gray, overcooked but not half as bad as they looked or smelled. He picked up his pudding cup, ready to enjoy the first nice thing to happen to him since he'd left work on Friday, and picked at the corner trying to open it with his teeth. The blow from behind caught him in the back of the shoulder and he flew forward, his face crashing into his tray, sending aftershocks through the table and spilling the other men's drinks. Aaron peered up at the bulldozer of a man who had knocked into him and felt every hair on his body stand on end. 

“Well, well, well, a little birdie told me you were in here...I couldn't believe it til I saw it with my own eyes...”

“Hey, Rawdon, leave him alone. We're just trying to eat here, no harm in that.” 

“You know what this fuckhead is, don't you Scales? Surprised you'd put your good name on the line...”

“For a Fed?” Scales asked, finishing the man's thought as he stood, moving until he was nose to nose with Rawdon. Aaron hadn’t realized Scales was so tall, the man stood hunched over, maybe just to appear less intimidating. “Everyone deserves a fair trial, even in here. I got no time for you and your brand of justice, so move along.” 

Rawdon stared down at Aaron for another moment, sneered at him wildly, and picked up Aaron's pudding cup from the table. Without wasting another moment, he dropped it to the floor, squashed it under his foot, and headed toward the door. Just before leaving, he whispered something in the guard's ear and smiled. Aaron was busy wiping his face off, staring a little sadly down at his destroyed pudding cup (which, he sort of figured was now a perfect metaphor for his life), when the guard approached him. He loomed over Aaron, his hand resting lightly at the grip of his baton.

“You make that mess?” 

“Not you too,” Scales muttered, shaking his head. The guard shot Scales a warning look, and though it looked like Scales wanted to say something more, he kept his mouth shut and turned his eyes down at his tray. He'd intervened enough on Aaron's behalf, he clearly had power, but it didn't extend to the guards. The air was stifling, all mouths closed and eyes on the guard now. Aaron was keenly aware of every creak of a bench, every soft chewing sound. 

“No, sir,” Aaron said, sitting up straight. The guard grinned. 

“Funny, cos I heard you did. That your pudding cup?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, way I see it...your pudding cup, your mess. Clean it up.”

Aaron dropped to his knees, napkin loosely gripped in his right hand, left hand cradled near his stomach, and started doing as he was told. He wasn't going to try and start problems with the guards, not when he already had a glaring target on his back. With Eric Rawdon in here, he knew there was no hiding what he was, not now. He couldn't believe this was where Rawdon had ended up and it couldn't be a coincidence. Rawdon belonged in maximum security and Aaron belonged in protective custody, and yet here they were – someone was pulling strings, and for the first time, Aaron felt like maybe he hadn't actually done what they said he'd done, like he might actually be innocent. It was a small, excruciating thing, to have hope, and he wished he could let it go. 

“We don't waste food in here,” the guard said, crouching beside Aaron. “You don't want to be wasteful do you? No, I know you don't. Lick it up. Every little bit, enjoy that dessert.” The guard reached down and grabbed the back of Aaron's head, fingers gripping his hair tight, and slammed his face into the ground, into the puddle of vanilla pudding, and Aaron watched as blood dripped from his nose, spreading through the cream colored mess. He closed his eyes, fireworks shooting painfully through the black behind his eyelids, and started licking the floor. He could feel himself gag, over and over again, it was relentless, the taste of vanilla and iron and dirt making the bile rise in his throat. It took everything in him not to throw it all back up, but he had a sick feeling that he'd end up having to lick that up too, and it was enough to keep him at his job. When he finished, he felt the guard drag him back to his feet and shove him onto the bench, and he finally opened his eyes, kept them trained on the table. He was burning with shame, his chest felt tight, but he heard the prisoners around him resume talking and eating now that the show was over. The guard walked away as fast as he'd come, leaving Aaron at the mercy of the table full of haggard old men who suddenly all seemed to be sharing the same look of intense pity. 

“You're new,” Scales said softly, pushing his pudding cup toward Aaron as a peace offering. “They'll get over it when someone fresh comes in. Just gotta keep your head down and your mouth shut.” 

“I don't think it'll be that easy,” Aaron whispered, holding his bandaged left hand against his bleeding nose, hoping it would help. “But thank you.”


	4. Chapter 4

“I can't sit in his office,” JJ muttered, staring into the cold, empty room. His towering shelves of books loomed over her, trophies and awards, photos of his family, it was all pressing in on her. She wasn't sure if they'd expected her to sit in his chair or not but she couldn't do it, she wouldn't do it. Hotch sits there, behind that desk, and no one else, that's what she kept telling herself. If she sat down in that chair, it would make it real. Dave stood behind her, hardly able to keep himself upright, leaning against the door like it was part of him. 

“You don't have to,” he said softly, patting her on the shoulder. “It's not a requirement of the job. You sit where you need to sit.”

“How do I do this?” she asked, turning around to face him, to really look at him. He looked so fragile all of a sudden, the lines around his eyes more prominent. She hadn't realized how very close he was to breaking, himself. “How do I even...”

“No one expects you to be him, Jennifer. Just do your best. We're all here to help.” She nodded, tucking a chunk of hair behind her ear nervously. She hated that she did that when she got nervous, but everyone had their thing and it was hers. She would pull at it, make it fall out and then tuck it back again endlessly. “Tara is going to be spending some of her time working with Aaron's defense team, they were glad to get her help, but Luke is all yours, and the rest of us will try to balance everything the best we can.”

“Yeah...sure...just...business as usual,” she muttered under her breath and he shook his head solemnly. 

“One day at a time.” 

***

“Derek? What are you doing here?” Jessica opened the door wide, letting Derek in. He was a sight for sore eyes. 

“Listen,” he started, entering the apartment and shutting the door behind him, not wanting to talk in the hall. He may not have been with the BAU anymore but old habits die hard, and talking privately in the open was something he still couldn't bring himself to do. “I heard about Aaron and I'm here to help. Penelope told me Jack...had some trouble and ran off? Tell me what happened.”

Jessica put on a pot of coffee and told him everything Jack had said, his sudden distrust of his father, the friend, the car. “I'm not a profiler, I don't do this stuff...but I know something is wrong.” 

“Has he ever said anything like that about Aaron before?”

“No! No never. Derek, he was so angry at me for defending him...I've never seen Jack like that.” 

Derek regarded her seriously for a moment, shaking his head. “Doesn't sound like the Jack I know. Mind if I have a look in his room?” She shook her head and walked him toward Jack's door, and as he walked in she went back to tend to the coffee. It was a force of habit, she always kept a pot brewing in Aaron's house, she was fairly sure his veins ran with the stuff and it wasn't his apartment if it didn't smell like a freshly brewed pot. Anything to make herself feel better. She didn't even know if Derek drank coffee. 

“Babygirl? Jack has his own computer, you think you could work some magic here?” He heard her squeal, suck in a deep breath, and he swore he could hear the bearings in her chair singing as she spun it around. 

“I know this whole situation is awful and it sucks...but it's SOSOSO good to hear you say that to me again. Yes, yes, I can...I can...is it alright, do you think? Do we know he's really missing? Would Hotch be okay with us doing this? It feels so icky.” 

“I'm in his room right now and I see a lot of signs that point to him not planning on coming back. Looks like he packed up clothes, his toothbrush, his room looks like it's been ransacked. There's a picture of his family on his desk and his Hotch’s face is scratched out. This kid is...angry. Something's wrong here and if anyone can figure it out, mama, it's you.” He pulled back Jack's sheets, opened drawers, looked through everything he could think of. He felt awful going through Jack's life, and he knew it was only going to get worse if he had to do the same thing down the hall in Aaron's room, but one thing at a time. If they didn't find Jack, nothing they did for Aaron would matter and they all knew it. 

She froze for a moment, wondering how much more the world could throw in their direction. It wasn't bad enough that they were trying to hunt down someone who they believed was framing their friend, but now they had to try and find his son too. “Bring me his computer, okay? I want it here, just in case. He could still...just be with a friend...right?” 

“Yeah. He could be. Let's just make sure, okay? I'll be there soon.” 

***

“So where are we going?” Jack asked, fiddling with the zipper on his backpack nervously. The further they drove away from his apartment, his home, his city, the more nervous he got about his decision. 

“You'll see,” the woman driving said, smiling. Her southern drawl was charming and she seemed kind enough, he didn't think there was any reason not to trust her. She said she was going to help him, said she knew his dad and showed him. He was afraid of his father, afraid of what his father had done or could do, he didn't know, it just scared him. “You'll be happier where we're going. No one will hurt you there.”

“My dad never hurt me...” he said softly, trying to find something he recognized out the window but everything was foreign. He'd never been this far from home without family. He was starting to feel guilty for being so mean to his aunt, she'd only ever taken care of him, better than anyone else. She'd only ever loved him.

“Well, not yet, but you know he would have. You saw.” 

He gulped and nodded. He did see, she'd shown him the photos of what his dad had done to George Foyet. She'd shown him a lot of things he wished he hadn't seen, wished he didn't know. Growing up wasn't as fun as he'd imagined it would be, and his father wasn't the hero he thought he was. 

***

“Sean, calm down,” Dave commanded, pacing from one end of his den to the other. It was well past the time he should have been in bed, and every time he tried to lay down, he saw Aaron's face. It was worse than a crime scene, worse than a case gone bad. His heart was racing, he was dead on his feet, and now Sean Hotchner was shouting at him from his New York apartment. 

“Calm down?! My brother is in prison! How is that even possible?! What could he have done?” 

“That's what we're trying to figure out,” Dave sighed, dropping finally onto his couch and letting himself sink into the cushions. He couldn't stand up another minute. “He'll be allowed visitation starting tomorrow, you're welcome to come down when you have time. Aside from that, Sean, I'm sorry...I don't know what else to tell you. We don't have much yet.” He yawned, a big jaw cracking yawn and let his eyes drift closed for a moment while he listened to Sean ramble on, words had stopped making sense. Sean's voice became a steady stream of noises akin to the adults talking on The Peanuts, and Dave mumbled something about going to bed before ending the call and finally succumbing to sleep, right there on the couch, phone still in his hand. All it took was an angry Hotchner to make it happen, if he'd known that he would have called Sean hours ago.

***

To say that Penelope Garcia was having a bad day would be the understatement of the year. Derek had brought in Jack's computer for her, and after visiting for much too short a time for her taste, he went home to his family and to process what he'd seen that day. She was left with a little boy's computer and a nagging feeling of guilt as she hacked her way into it and began to violate what little privacy a child his age has, especially knowing the father he had. Everything was locked down as hard as it could be, and yet she found a few cracks where the bad could creep in, and with a sick feeling, she realized it had. Jack's friend Michael wasn't a boy from school, it was, so far she could tell, a fake profile set up by someone who was very skilled at covering their tracks. What little she did know was that this Michael knew an awful lot about Aaron, more than she or anyone in the BAU knew, and they'd shared all of his darkest secrets with Jack, an eleven year old boy (nearly twelve, days away she knew) who wouldn't know a good way to process it. Hell, she was a grown woman and she didn't know how to process what she was seeing. 

“Agent Rossi? Sir?” she asked, and she could hear the way his voice broke with sleep. He was mumbling incoherently and she felt terrible for bothering him. “I'm sorry, it can wait until morning. Please call me tomorrow...” 

With a sick feeling creeping through her chest, she shut Jack's computer and packed up her things. She couldn't see another thing, couldn't think about it anymore. What she needed was a cup of tea and Sergio. 

***

There was no silence in prison, not at night, not anytime. Aaron lay on his side, curled around his broken hand in its useless blood soaked gauze, his back to the wall and stared straight ahead. Scales had been sleeping for hours now, and though he was beyond tired, he was just listening. There were whispers from all over, hushing just as the guards would walk by and then starting again. Rustling blankets, metal grinding against concrete, too many new noises. It was cold, freezing even, and his blankets put hospital blankets to shame for uselessness. It was like draping yourself in tissue paper and expecting to keep warm. Scales seemed to have no problem but Aaron was shivering. On a good day, Aaron was anxious, but here? Now? That didn't begin to cover it. The only thing keeping him from the brink of madness was the knowledge that he had visitation with Garcia in the morning, it gave him something to cling to. Considering that this was only his first night, he wasn't exactly brimming with hope for his own adjustment. He tried to slow his breathing, close his eyes, think of things that made him feel good and calm, anything to try and get some sleep. 

“Sit up,” came a voice from the darkness outside his room and he heard the key turn in the lock. It was the guard from earlier, and Aaron sat himself up with some considerable effort. He'd nearly managed to fall asleep before the interruption. “You don't wanna sleep when we give you time to sleep huh? Well there's work to be done. Come on.” 

Aaron stood, holding his injured hand close, following the guard out of the cell and down the corridor. He heard hushed whispers, the guard telling people to shut up, and they walked out of the cell block and toward the laundry room. 

“We got lotsa laundry here, and hey, you don't need sleep tough guy? Make yourself useful huh.” 

Aaron stared at him, furrowing his brow, trying to focus on the instructions he was being given. He had no idea how he'd even begin to do any of it in his condition but he wasn't planning to start trouble. Not now, not after the day he'd already had. Scales had told him to keep his head down and do what was asked of him without complaint and he intended to give that his best shot, at least until it didn't work, and then he might try another tactic. He thought violence might be next on his list. The guard walked out of the door, but he could see him just on the other side of the glass, his back to Aaron and the laundry room. He set to work, trying his best to load and unload commercial sized machines with only one barely functioning hand, and he kept at it all night. Sunlight crept in through the cracks in the covered window and his legs felt like jello, but he worked until he was told to stop, told that it was breakfast time. 

In the mess hall, he found Scales and sat with him, tried to keep his head from falling flat into his tray of food. He didn't feel everyone staring at him this time and it was a welcome spot of relief. 

“Where'd they take you last night?” Scales asked, and Aaron told him about his night as he picked at his oatmeal and cantaloupe. It hadn't been terrible, he said, but he wasn't eager to do it again. “You gotta sleep or you're gonna end up in the infirmary. Guy like you doesn't wanna end up there.” 

“I'll try,” Aaron said softly. 

“You got a visitor today? You better watch who comes. Anyone here sees you with someone looks like a cop, you'll be sucking your meals through a straw for the next month. Seems like people already know what you are but it isn't causing problems yet...let's keep it that way. You start bringing cops in here, I can't do nothing for you.”

“No cops,” he replied. “Just friends.”

“Guy like you doesn't look like he's got many friends...”

***

“Oh, oh hi sir,” Penelope said, staring at a face she'd been longing to see for days now. He looked awful, so tired, his nose was angry and swollen and big black bruises had spread their tendrils beneath his eyes. “I've missed you. We all have.” She was wearing her most enthusiastic pinks and greens, fuzzy clips in her hair, and heels with butterflies all over them. She had taken Dave very, very seriously and made sure that she didn't look anything like an FBI agent, not even a little bit. Aaron noticed, and appreciated the gesture. 

“Aaron,” he whispered, leaning forward. “Please, Penelope. Just call me Aaron.” 

She stammered a moment, unable to make the word form on her lips. She'd only ever called him Aaron accidentally, it didn't feel right, it felt like a violation. “Yes, sir, I mean...okay...Aaron...” 

“Thank you Penelope.” 

“Are you...I know this is a silly question but are you okay?”

He looked so serious, so sad, and he shrugged. “I've been better,” was his reply, and it spoke volumes. She didn't think she'd ever heard him say anything other than that he was fine, and she'd almost expected him to say it this time. 

“You're going to be fine,” she said with a very self-assured nod, her blonde curls bobbing softly around her face. “We're going to figure this out and we're going to get you back. Don't you worry.” He tried to smile, but it just hurt his face and maybe it took more energy than he had in his reserve because it didn't last. She smiled, though, she gave him her biggest, brightest smile. He was leaning heavily against the back of his chair, and as he listened to her speak, his eyes drifted closed and shot open again. He tried stretching his neck side to side, rolling his shoulders, anything to get his blood pumping. 

“Did you hear me?” she asked, looking at him curiously. He sighed and his shoulders slumped, she'd never seen him look like this before. 

“I'm sorry, Penelope, I didn't...”

“Sir...Aaron...have you slept?” She already knew the answer, she could see it. And she couldn't blame him, how could someone like him sleep in a place like this? She knew how he was, he had a hard time sleeping under the best circumstances. 

“We don't have much time..how is Jack?”

“Oh...” she stammered, and he watched as she went pale as a ghost. Her reaction sent a shiver down his spine and suddenly he felt excruciatingly awake, a sudden shock of fear igniting his nerves. “He's...”

“Penelope,” he whispered, leveling his glare at her. Suddenly he looked like Hotch, angry and awake and so so scary. She blinked back the hot sting of tears as she searched for a way to fix this. “Penelope.” 

“Please don't worry, sir, please. We're going to find him. He just got mad at Jessica and went to stay at a friend's house and we're going to find him...” She watched him change before her eyes, as he went from afraid to angry, as he struggled to find the words, to control his temper flaring just beneath the surface. He remembered the feeling of yelling at his mother over the cake, the way the rage just exploded to the surface without warning, and he was glad he'd worked so hard to tame that beast. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. We're going to find him.” 

“You said he went to a friend's. If he's just at a friend's house then why are you so upset? Who is this friend?” His hands were shaking and he toyed with the frayed edges of his bloody bandage. Whatever was happening was not her fault, he had to keep reminding himself of that – it was his, it was his own fault. He should have transferred out of the BAU when he had the opportunity, if he'd just done what Haley wanted so many years ago then everything would have been fine. Good, even. She would be alive, maybe they’d have more kids, maybe he would have had an opportunity to ride that school bus for a field trip with one of them. This was his penance for his selfishness. 

“Um, Michael?” she squeaked, and she watched as a guard approached where they sat talking, she knew her time was up. This was the worst possible way to end her visit. “I called Derek. He's going to find Jack. Please don't worry. Just keep yourself safe.” 

“He doesn't know a Michael.”

“I...I know...please. Please just focus on staying safe, sir. Let us handle the rest.”

“Time's up,” the guard said from behind Aaron and he stood up, still locking eyes with Penelope. This hadn't gone well, not at all, and she was so ashamed. Her job was to make him smile, make him feel better, give him hope, and instead she did the opposite. She stood up, wiping the tears from her cheeks and nodded. 

“I'm sorry. I didn't...” she began, but he shook his head. 

“Thank you for coming, Penelope.” 

***

“We're stayin' here for the night,” the woman said, pulling her car into the driveway of a house somewhere in Tennessee. The house was dark, broken down with trees looming over the yard in big shadowy patches and it made Jack a little afraid. He wanted to go home. “Come on in, we'll have some dinner. You hungry?”

“Yeah...” he said, hugging his backpack to his chest. “Can I go home in the morning? I think...I want to go home.”

“You don't live there anymore, remember? Remember what your dad did? Give me a chance, I promise you'll love it.” 

***

Dave shut the door behind him as he entered Penelope's office. He leaned there for a moment, waiting for her to turn around. 

“I messed up, sir,” she whispered, her head hanging solemnly. He'd never seen her so distraught. “I messed up big time.” Sucking in a deep breath, she tried to look at him, and explain to him what she'd said during her visit with Aaron. He was upset at first, he wanted to snap at her, she had one job to do, but he couldn't. If it had been him, he would probably have given just as much away as she had – they just needed to fix it. She told him how Aaron looked, how he acted, the things he said. She fidgeted with her fluffy pen, held back tears, and waited – he was being so quiet. 

“Garcia,” he began, finally, after a long moment of careful reflection. “Find Jack. Do whatever it is you do, work your magic and find Jack. That's how we fix this.” 

“Yes, sir, I know...I just...about...we need to...” she hadn't even had the chance to tell him what she'd seen on Jack's computer. Everything about this was awful, every single thing. “This Michael person has access to things I've never even seen, things that aren’t in any of Hotch’s personnel files. They sent Jack all kinds of terrible things about his dad, it’s no wonder he wanted to get away. He’s probably terrified.”

“What things?” Dave asked, approaching Penelope's desk now as she opened Jack's laptop, revealing a file of crime scene photos, bloody pictures of Haley and Foyet and Hotch. “He saw these?”

“All of them, sir,” she mumbled, staring down at her hands. “And other things. This Michael is really, really scary good...I'm having a hard time tracing them but I'm not going to stop, everyone slips up and I'll find where they did.” 

“Send me everything that Jack saw, Garcia.”

“Oh, sir, I don't think...you don't want to see...”

“Send me everything. I have a meeting with Aaron’s defense team this afternoon, I need to know what we're up against. Whatever this Michael sent to Jack could just as easily end up in the hands of the prosecution. It may already have. They found two more bodies they’re connecting to him and we need to figure out how and why.”

She nodded and bit her lip as she set to work and she couldn't think of anything she'd ever done that made her feel more repulsive. “Done.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Guys in the yard today were talkin' about you, said you got a reputation, callin' you Law Man out there,” Scales said, laying back on his bed with his eyes closed. “Sounds like String Bean ain't gonna stick. Damn shame, too, I liked that one. I heard some stories about you.”

“What stories?” Aaron asked. He was lying on his side, back to the wall, curled inside of his blankets and ready to sleep. He was too long for his bed to be comfortable stretched out, too long for his blankets, and though sleeping curled up like this always made his hips ache, he had no choice if he wanted to stay warm. They were ten minutes to lights out and he intended to sleep if it was the last thing he did. 

“You got a lotta enemies in here, but so far most don't wanna mess around with you. Got a few I'm holding off for the time being, only because you're interesting and it ain't easy to come by cell mates don't wanna get into your business. You seem like a nice, private guy. My advice? Snap outta whatever hopeless funk you're in, we all get into it at first, but you're coming in here with a reputation for not taking any shit and not backing down, lotta these guys are afraid of you – not all of em, but if you live up to it, you might be alright, especially for a Fed. Stay in here long enough you could be runnin' the place.”

“I'd rather not,” Aaron sighed. He closed his eyes and thanked his lucky stars for the small break. With any luck, it would be enough to help him sleep. 

“Yeah...you like puttin' us away too much, huh? Guess that'd be hard to give up.”

“Lights out, ladies!” they heard a guard holler from the end of the corridor, and all of the lights shut off. Aaron didn't flinch this time, just pulled the blanket up over his face, and fell fast asleep. He supposed if the worst that happened to him was that someone came into his cell and hurt him or killed him, well, at least he went out getting his first night of sleep in almost a week. He could think of worse things. 

***

In the backwoods of southern Tennessee, Jack lay tucked into a strange bed in a strange house full of strange people and was crying himself to sleep thinking about his family, how much he missed them, how badly he'd messed up. He was in a room with four other children, all crying, all younger than he was save for one girl who said she was thirteen but he wasn't sure he believed her, he thought maybe she was just trying to one up him. He was so much like his father that he just let her have it, didn't want to argue something so silly. He was still angry at his father, but now that he wasn't staring at those awful photos, he was feeling more than just anger – he was thinking about when his dad was young, the things those reports said, he didn't know where they came from and he'd never met most of the people mentioned but he knew, somehow, they must have been true. He didn't fully understand it all. He was feeling so sad for his father, so mad at him for hiding things from him, so alone. He wished he could remember the way his mother sang to him at night, the warmth of her when she tucked him in. 

***

“Emily!” Dave cried as he threw his front door open. It was too early in the morning to be smiling, and he'd grumbled the entire way to the door, but seeing her face made him light up. “You got here fast.”

“First flight I could get on,” she said, walking into Dave's house quickly. He grabbed her bag and rushed it down the hallway while she hung her coat up and waited for him. “Thanks for letting me crash here, I didn't know what you guys needed so I didn't want to book a room yet. Penelope said Jack's missing? Do we think he's on the road somewhere? I'll go wherever you need me to go.” 

“Too early for this, coffee first,” Dave muttered, ushering her toward his kitchen. The sunlight poured in through the windows, speckling the counters in warm gold and bright yellow. He set to making coffee while Emily rummaged through his refrigerator, trying to find something edible that wouldn't require actual cooking. “We can grab breakfast on the way to the BAU,” he said, noting her look of dissatisfaction as she closed the door. His fridge was packed with food, but not a single convenience snack anywhere in sight. “My treat.” 

“Deal,” she replied, sitting down at the table, listening to her stomach growl. Yes, I'm about to dump coffee in there, shut up, she said to herself. “So tell me about Jack. Please.”

Dave poured the steaming coffee into mugs and sauntered over toward the table carefully, setting hers down first before taking a seat across from her. “It's complicated. Someone created a fake profile, posing as a boy his age, and it looks like they've been talking for a few weeks now. About two days before Aaron was arrested, this Michael started telling him things about his father – we'll get into details later, on an as needed basis. I'd like to protect Aaron's privacy as much as I can, you understand.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. She, of all people, knew how important privacy was. She also knew Aaron well enough that if there were things he hadn't told her, he didn't intend for her to know them, and that was good enough for her. 

“These things Michael was sending, they were very upsetting to Jack. On the day of his arrest, Jack received a file including photos of his mother, Foyet and Aaron. The photos were official crime scene photos. Whomever it was that sent them, Garcia says is one technically impressive scumbag. I added that last part.” 

“I'm sure she wouldn't argue,” Emily mumbled, sipping the too hot coffee, burning the tip of her tongue. Just the way she liked it. Coffee and pain were a dynamic duo. “So we obviously think the two are related, right? I'm not just grasping at straws here?”

“Right. They have to be related, we just have to figure out how. We're meeting the team over lunch to talk about what we know so far, and to figure out who the victims are, why they're important to pin on Aaron. I just got the names today, and there is another that they were alerted to this morning.”

“But he's incarcerated.”

“Decomposition puts the time of death on each victim within two days of his arrest,” Dave said, letting out a long, pained sigh. “We're up to five bodies they're pinning on him.”

“Okay, so they honestly want us to believe he just ran around town beating five people to death over the course of a weekend bender? The idea of Hotch on a bender, period...I'm sorry, it's not a joke. I'm sorry.” Dave gave her a look, the kind that said she wasn't wrong, but it wasn't the time, he wasn’t ready to laugh about any of it. She read it loud and clear. They'd joke later, when Aaron wasn't locked up in a cell somewhere.

“He left work on Friday, and he was arrested on Sunday. That doesn't leave him much time, but no one heard from him at all – he was supposed to have been at a leadership conference for the weekend in DC, he never checked into his hotel. Never showed up at the conference. Jessica didn't hear from him, but she didn't find it odd, he wasn't expected home until Sunday evening. Whoever did this had to have been watching him for a while, had access to his schedule.” 

“You don't sound convinced...what else could it be? Do you think it's possible that he did it? That he murdered those people?” 

“No, absolutely not. I don't know what to think, Emily, that's why I need all of you. I'm glad you're here, I do know that. How long do we have you?”

“As long as you need, I'm on personal leave. If it turns out to be the work of anyone who has international ties, Interpol has offered me their support and it becomes work. Until that point, this is me making good use of my vacation hours I guess.”

“Oh, Emily,” Dave began, but she shushed him as quickly as he began. 

“Don't you oh Emily me. Hotch is worth it. You're all worth it. I can get a hotel room, once I know what you want from me and where I'm needed.”

“Nonsense, stay here. It's just me in this big place, the company will be nice.”

“We're going to need to discuss that fridge if I'm staying here, Rossi,” she said with a smile, finishing off her coffee. It didn't even get a chance to cool down, and it burned in her empty stomach. “I'm going shopping, but I think you owe me breakfast first.”

“I do.”

***

Breakfast was uneventful, and Aaron was getting to know his way around the laundry room and how to use the machines with only one hand. He was scheduled for a shower and new clothes just before lunch and he was looking forward to it to some degree, and dreading it to another. It had been two days and no one had bothered him, he'd been able to sleep at night and rest in the afternoons, he was left alone in the yard, and he suspected it was Scales who was responsible for it all. He wasn't sure how he'd gotten so lucky, but his fortune was not lost on him. 

“Law Man,” came a voice from the doorway and Aaron turned to see another inmate standing there, a smaller man who didn't look terribly sure of himself. They often worked together for part of the laundry shift, but he had so far been on his own that morning. “Shower time.” Aaron nodded and set aside his unfinished bin. Aaron lived for showers, but he knew this was going to be unpleasant and humiliating. He thought of middle school, being a gangly thirteen year old boy stepping into those showers for the first time. Sure, he'd known everyone, it was a small town, but when you had to let it all hang out it was like meeting someone for the first time. 

“Woah, Hotchner, you like it rough huh?” Jimmy had asked, and Aaron looked down, the sudden realization that his ribs were black and blue hitting him hard. He shrugged and tried to move away from his friends, to a shower on the far end where he could just rinse and be done with it, no questions. Jimmy followed him, asked him what was up, and he made up a lie about falling out of his treehouse. Jimmy seemed to buy it because he didn't press the issue, either that or he understood what that was really code for and was helping his friend save some face. Whatever reason he had, Aaron was grateful for the silence. That was the moment he decided to play football, even though he had no interest, at least no one in the showers would ask about his bruises after that. Who didn't have bruises after playing a sport like that? He'd be off the hook at least part of the year.   
“Come on, Law Man,” the smaller man said. They'd been buddied up for his orientation, and Aaron had no idea what his real name was, everyone just called him Fisher Price because he was so petite, he barely came up to Aaron's chin. He was rough, though, people didn't seem to mess with him much. 

They walked down the hall, falling into step with a flood of other inmates, and stepped outside into the crisp autumn air. Aaron turned his face up into the sunlight, just for a moment, and then they were entering a new building with a long, dark hallway marked with a yellow line down the center. The inmates crushed inside and fell into single file, or a reasonable facsimile, and listened to the deafening sounds of inmates and guards yelling, echoing through the hallway. As they stood in line, they were forced to disrobe if they hadn't already, some of them had come from their cells and were already in nothing but boxers while others had come from working the laundry or kitchen. Aaron watched as Fisher Price started shedding his clothing, down to his boxers and shower shoes, and he followed suit. It made him intensely uncomfortable. He felt goosebumps spread from his shoulders to his ankles. The smell was overpowering as they approached the shower, he couldn't have described it even if he'd wanted to, except that he'd been around enough decaying bodies to know all of the smells were inherently organic. 

A few female guards sauntered down the hall as they shuffled toward the showers, one whistled in Aaron's direction. “Look at that fresh meat!” she called to her friend, who looked Aaron up and down and clicked her tongue at him. He felt his skin crawl and stared straight ahead. 

“One towel!” called one guard as the inmates reached for their tiny spot of cloth that could barely be considered a towel. “One soap!” and next was a sliver of soap slapped into the palm of Aaron's hand, he did his best not to flinch or drop the soap, just glad that he'd draped the towel over his broken hand. Once his soap was in hand, he was shoved into the showers – there were easily double the number of people inside than there should have been, all of whom were naked and yelling, shoving each other out of the way, bodies sliding and slapping against bodies. It was, to the best of his knowledge, an actual waking nightmare. It was impossible not to bump into other men, but Aaron did his best to twist and turn, following Fisher Price toward the back of the showers where it wasn't so packed. They managed to find a shower head that only had one man beneath it and waited their turn to share. Aaron removed the bandage from his hand and let it run under the water, soaped it up and wrung it back out once the crusted blood was washed and left only yellow and brown stains. While he waited to wash himself, he wrapped the wet bandage back around his hand, tighter this time, hissing as his broken metacarpals ground against one another. They said they had a waiting list for non-emergencies, so he would have to manage a few more days before he could see the doctor. He'd take duct tape at this point, just to make it less agonizing every time he banged it on a laundry bin or rolled over on it in bed. 

“That doesn't look good,” Fisher Price said, indicating for Aaron to get himself under the lukewarm blast of water before someone else swept in. “You get that checked out?”

“I'm on the list,” Aaron muttered, stepping into the water and letting it rush down over the top of his head, cascading like rain down his cheeks. He hadn't felt so good in a week. He almost didn't care that he was naked in a room with more than 200 other men, showers were his everything. 

“Hey, Rawdon just came in...he's lookin' at you...” Fisher Price called, breaking Aaron's momentary trance. He glanced at the doorway and saw Eric Rawdon, eyes trained on him, but instead of looking away he set his features, scowling dangerously at the other man. Rawdon disappeared into the crowd of men, and Aaron finished up washing himself. On his way out, drying himself off with his washrag parading as a towel, he sloshed through backed up water. He was following Fisher Price, but as soon as his partner walked through the doors, the two female guards stepped in front of him, barring his path. 

“Where you going, pretty boy?” one asked, and she was almost the same size as Aaron. Same height, same build. “You got an admirer.” Aaron stared straight ahead, refusing to turn around, but it didn't matter, he felt Rawdon's hand on his shoulder, instinctively knew exactly who it was, and felt himself go flying backward into a mass of bodies that, blessedly, broke his fall. He splashed into the backed up water, tangled in boxers and toilet paper and mushed up soap, and Rawdon and his friends attacked – they stomped on him, kicked him, forced his face down into the water. It was over as fast as it had started, when another guard stepped in and told them it was enough, she wasn't going to have someone die on her watch. She didn't mind them roughing someone up a little, but she had her limits apparently. Setting the bar for success awfully low, Aaron thought to himself as he sputtered and clawed just to keep his face out of the filthy water. He could feel the filth burning its way into his lungs, trying desperately not to cough, not to react. Rawdon and his friends left, and Aaron forced himself to his feet, hiding the incredible, overwhelming feeling that he needed oxygen but he wouldn't let them see him gasp for air, he could hold it. Holding his breath was easy, it was going to be the letting it back out that would be a challenge. He straightened up as best he could and walked, stiffly, painfully, out of the shower, listening to the guard say something about his backside on the way out. He pressed his arms hard against his ribs, pressure always felt comforting, he'd gotten to be rather good at giving himself hugs as a child when no one else would. Fisher Price had realized he was gone and stopped to wait for him down the hall where the new clothing was waiting for them. Aaron didn't say a word, just stood there bleeding, arms crossed over his aching chest, and waited to be handed his new clothes. It took him longer to get into them, but they were a full size too big, so at least the fact that he was still soaking wet didn't stop him getting into them. The walk back to his cell was silent, Fisher Price made sure he stayed close but he didn't say a word and Aaron wasn't sure if he was in on the attack or not but he didn't think so, not the way the man looked at him, unless they'd threatened him – he couldn't blame him, either way. He didn't owe Aaron any kindness just because he'd been forced to show him the ropes. When he entered, he made no eye contact with Scales who was reading on his bed. Aaron eased himself slowly, painfully down onto his cot, clenching his jaw to stifle the groans and curled up under his blanket, sopping wet and freezing, willing himself to go to sleep until his meeting with Dave and his defense team in a few hours. He knew Scales was watching him out of the corner of his eye, he just hoped the man would have enough decorum not to say a word. To let him save face.


	6. Chapter 6

“Okay, can I just say that having all of you in here right now…it’s just…wow. It’s like having the whole family together…except…well…” Garcia looked at Dave and bit into her lip, shaking her head. “Almost the whole family.”

“Garcia,” Dave said, tapping his watch. “I hate to rush things, but Tara and I haven’t got much time. Let’s discuss what we have so far.”

“Right. If you’ll turn your attention to the board, we have victims one through five. On the surface, it doesn’t appear they have anything in common except the brutality, every one of them was so badly damaged that they had to identify them using dental records, but I did some digging and…”

“Wait. Rudy Turner? He rear ended me last year, we got into a pretty heated dispute over fault,” JJ said, pointing to victim #3. “Henry and Jack were in the car with me, I was taking them to school because Hotch had an early meeting that day. I was late to work because of it.”

“Yes,” Garcia said, nodding a little apprehensively. “That’s what I was going to say. Each of the victims had a seemingly minor altercation with members of this team…Derek, victim #1 was Donald Turk, a former renter at one of your properties who took you to court for…”

“Mold. Tried to drag my name through the dirt, said my house was filled with black mold and it got him sick,” Derek’s voice was low as he stared up at the photo of the man beside Hotch, the victim he’d been caught beside. “So they think he’s turned into some kind of vigilante?” 

Garcia looked at Dave, and both nodded. It was Dave who stood and spoke next, letting Garcia take a moment. She hated doing these things. “Essentially. They found alprazolam and clonazepam on his tox screen, and in the amounts found, it would have been enough to account for the fact that he can’t seem to remember anything. We know Peter Lewis uses his own cocktails, and he’s been perfecting them for so long that we won’t find anything else of value on that front, but we all know what his drugs do so let’s just cut to the chase here. The fact that all of the victims are tied to members of this team tells me that this is Lewis, without a doubt. When he had Aaron, he told me his greatest fear was harm coming to each of us. He told me that he watched and listened as each of us died in that house and he was helpless. He stayed with me for days afterward because he was afraid of what had been done to him, what he saw, thought he might be a danger to us or his family. Lewis tried to spin it as a danger to us last year, in order to distract us while he escaped from prison. It looks like now he’s moving in the opposite direction. Frankly, a direction that’s a lot easier to sell.”

“Hotch wouldn’t,” JJ whispered, but everyone around the room looked like they were thinking the same thing. Peter Lewis induced psychotic breaks, and if he’d managed to succeed with Hotch, he could have been capable of just about anything. The air in the room was stifling and she felt sick to her stomach even considering that the carnage on the board could have been carried out by someone she loved and trusted. 

“Garcia,” Dave said softly. “Give us what you know about Jack. Make it quick, Tara and I have to leave soon.” 

“I don’t have much. I do know that this Michael is a fake, a profile created for the sole purpose of getting into Jack’s life and gaining his trust. The sick bastard was sending him all kinds of things about Hotch, things to make him doubt his dad. Jack saw photos of his mom dead, saw photos of Foyet and Hotch and he’s not even twelve yet and…”

“Garcia,” Dave was trying to keep her on track. 

“Right. Sorry. I’m just so angry. Those photos and the other things he sent Jack are like super duper confidential, some of the stuff he got was so tightly locked down I’ve never even seen it before. I’m still working on the code, but we know Peter Lewis has mad skills, and that’s exactly what it would take to pull this off.”

“Wait, we’re saying Peter Lewis orchestrated both sending Hotch to prison for murder and kidnapping Jack, simultaneously – so which one is the end game?” Derek looked horrified. He almost thought he missed this job sometimes, but times like these reminded him that he could live without it. 

“Both,” Spencer chimed in, having been mostly silent for days now, lost in his head. “If you remember Lewis’ story, his father was sent to prison after the children told their stories about Mr. Scratch to Dr. Ragan, and was killed inside for being a pedophile – Peter was thirteen. Just about Jack’s age. Because of the way Lewis induces psychological breaks in his victims, and the physical state of Hotch’s body when he was found, it is possible he did commit the murders. The probability is low, based on what we know about Hotch, and I think he would rather see Hotch in prison for something he didn’t do in the same way he believes his father was falsely accused, but we have to consider that he may have done it all.” 

“What you know about Hotch,” Dave said, his voice deadly serious, “is likely very little, if you really add it all up. It’s what he wants you to know about him. What Jack now knows about Hotch could be damning.” 

“What’s he going to do with Jack?” Emily asked, and everyone stared blankly at her. 

***

“I know you’re not sleepin,” Scales grumbled, turning the page in his book. “Rawdon’s a monster, don’t belong in Gen Pop.”

“Don’t worry about it,” came Aaron’s voice from inside of his blankets. Scales was right, he wasn’t sleeping. He’d tried, but the deep ache in his lungs felt like suffocating and made him afraid to close his eyes. Under his blankets was comforting, it was warm, it blocked out everything else – all the noise, all the cement and metal and gloom. His sternum was a lightning rod of pain, sparks shooting out from all directions as he breathed. 

“You’re gonna need to see the doc, I can hear ya breathin’ from over here. I’ve seen enough fights in this place to know when somethin’ needs looked at.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Aaron said in a tone that was probably more clipped and short than he’d intended but he wasn’t in the mood for conversation. “I’ll make it.” Scales smiled, he liked this guy. Something about him, the way he just didn’t give a shit, the way he didn’t whine or complain, the way he kept to himself. Scales was always on the lookout for a cell mate who just wouldn’t drive him up the wall – he was a lifer, and he was too old to deal with the feisty ones and the busy bodies. Law Man looked like the sort who liked to read and sleep and be left alone, just like him. 

“You got a family, Law Man?”

“A son,” Aaron poked his head out, saw Scales sitting on his bed now, looking at him. “He’s eleven. His name is Jack.” 

“Solid name,” Scales replied with a smile. It looked like something his face didn’t do often, it was unnatural and strained but genuine. “Wife?”

“No.”

“Husband?”

“No.”

“Better that way. It always goes bad, they don’t stick around long with us lifers.”

Aaron scowled and shook his head. The muscles in his neck protested the movement. “I haven’t been convicted of anything.”

“Of course,” Scales said, nodding. “Not yet. Everyone in here’s innocent you know.” He winked. Some part of him did believe that Law Man was innocent, he seemed too by the book, too stoic, too proud of what he did and what he was to throw it all away like that, but you don’t just get thrown behind bars like this before you stand trial for no reason. Guys like him almost always got out on bail, house arrest, something light. It was unorthodox, but everything about his entry into the system seemed that way, and it wasn’t Scales’ job to sort through it, that was above his pay grade. 

“Hotchner,” a guard said, approaching the doorway. “Your lawyers are here. Get up.” 

“Shit,” Aaron groaned, pushing himself upright, gritting his teeth against the creaking and grinding in his ribs. He sucked in his breath and stood, waited a minute to find himself steady enough to walk, and moved slowly out of his cell as the door was opened. The guard cuffed his hands and feet, and was shockingly gentle while he did so. He followed behind Aaron as they approached the end of the cell block, waited for the door to open, and made their way to the interview rooms. Once beside the door, Aaron could see three people he wasn’t familiar with, and beside them sat Dave and Tara, people he couldn’t be happier to see. They caught sight of him, locked eyes, watched as the guard removed his cuffs and gave him the rules. 

“Listen,” the guard said in a hushed tone. “Rules say you can hug quickly, if you want. You’re on camera, no sound, hands where we can see them at all times. You give us any reason to suspect funny business and we won’t let it happen next time. Got it?”

“Got it.” 

The guard looked at Aaron a moment longer and he thought he detected pity in the man’s eyes, not exactly what he wanted but at least he’d found one guard who didn’t want him dead. The door opened and he was guided inside, and when the door closed behind him, the guard moved to his desk nearby. Aaron knew how these meetings worked, he’d been in plenty of them as an agent and a lawyer, but he never imagined being on this side of it. He stood awkwardly beside the door and watched as Dave approached him, looked him up and down, and wrapped him in a hug. Aaron let out a soft whimper, unexpectedly, but melted into the short embrace anyway. He’d never needed a hug more. The guards didn’t break them up, let the hug last longer than it was said they could, but their hands were in plain view, Aaron just didn’t move. He slumped against Dave, buried his face in his friend’s shoulder and closed his eyes. 

“I’m so sorry, Aaron,” Dave whispered, holding his friend gently for another moment before breaking the embrace and leading him toward the table. He took his seat beside Aaron, watching the way he sat down so slowly, shifted painfully in his seat. “Are you okay?”

“Eric Rawdon is in here.” He stared directly at Dave, watched for his reaction. “He should be in Supermax. Why is he here?”

“Rawdon?” Dave asked, shooting Tara a look of concern. “I don’t know, Aaron. You’ve seen him?”

Aaron just glared at him, dared him to make the connection between his broken face and a man he’d put in prison not once but twice. He watched as the realization and then the horror crossed Dave’s features. 

“Have you been seen by a doctor?” Dave asked, glancing at Aaron’s poorly bandaged hand. Aaron sighed. 

“I have an appointment tomorrow. We don’t have time for you to worry about me, Dave. What do you need?”

Dave sighed and introduced Aaron to his lawyers. He knew the bureau attorney already, but Dave’s were new to him and he couldn’t believe Dave was so convinced of his innocence that he was willing to pay such an enormous amount of money to prove it. Sometimes he realized he had no idea the amount of wealth Dave actually had. They went over the basis for their case, what Garcia had managed to come up with on the victims and their locations, the drugs found in his system. They asked him if he’d remembered anything else from Friday night onward, Tara asked him a slew of questions, asked him if any of the victim names meant anything to him. It was exhausting, but it was better than being in his cell or anywhere else he could possibly be at that moment. He almost felt normal, could almost trick himself into thinking he was there meeting with colleagues, but that was dangerous, it was a slippery slope because at the end of the meeting, he wouldn’t be walking out that door with them.

“What about Jack?” Aaron asked, afraid of the answers that might come. “Is he okay?”

“Agent Hotchner,” his lawyer said softly. “I know you have concerns about your son, but we need to focus on your defense for this meeting, we have limited time.” 

Aaron shot Dave a look, pleading with him for answers. “Dave?”

“The Warden gave me an extra ten minutes to sit with you once the interview is over, my own personal time. I can still throw my weight around, apparently. It can wait.”

The rest of the interview was agony, picking through his memory, his week leading up to the arrest, his life. The more personal the questions got, the more uncomfortable he got. 

“The prosecution has character witnesses lined up to testify that you have always exhibited violent tendencies,” one of Dave’s lawyers said, and he looked a little apprehensive to continue. Aaron was an intimidating looking man by nature, but in prison blues with a broken face, he looked more than a little scary. “We need to know what kind of information the following people can give them: Tamara Olsen, Marcus Waldorf, James Bergman and…”

“Where did they get those names?” Aaron interrupted, narrowing his eyes at the lawyer. “I haven’t had contact with any of those people since I was a teenager. Why…” he began, and then he stopped and he felt his heart thunder wildly in his chest. He looked at Dave, his eyes full of desperation. “Dave?”

“Who are they and what will they say?” The lawyer again. He forgot how much he hated lawyers. It was one of the biggest draws to joining the FBI. 

Aaron had no words. His mouth had gone dry, his flesh ignited in painful goosebumps. “I don’t know.”

“Lying isn’t going to do you any favors,” the third lawyer chimed in. Her voice was high and grating, Aaron didn’t want to hear her speak again, and yet he knew she was about to. “You need to be honest with us.” 

“I need to know why those people were contacted. They’re unreliable at best, I haven’t seen any of them in more than thirty years.”

“Aaron,” Dave’s voice was so quiet, and Aaron could feel the warmth from his proximity. Dave felt like a heater and he was drawn to it. “Please. Just cooperate. They’re trying to help.”

Rage. That’s what it felt like, he’d done so well keeping it bottled up for most of his adult life, but lately the pressure had been building. Threatening to explode. “I beat up Marcus Waldorf under the bleachers when I was sixteen. The school recorded it as bullying, said he was the victim, said I had a history of violent outbursts and suspended me. What they didn’t record was that Marcus stole cigarettes and cash from the gas station on the highway and when he got caught, he told his dad it was me that talked him into it, made him do it for me, brought the cops to my door asking about my involvement. I was just an easy target. Regardless, my father put me in the hospital after that one.” 

“Your…” the chirpy lawyer started and as she connected the dots, she paused. “Oh.” 

“Yeah. So when I was feeling up to it, I decided to share my experience with Marcus. It wasn’t the right thing to do, but I don’t regret it.”

“Ok…we’re going to need to pull those records. The gas station, the hospital, all of it – Agent Rossi, can you have your tech girl do that?” chirpy asked, and then turned back to Aaron. “What about James?”

“He was one of my best friends growing up. I never beat him up, if that’s what you’re wondering.” 

It was what she was wondering, but she hadn’t wanted to agree with him. He was being unnecessarily difficult and rude for someone they were trying to help. “If you don’t want to cooperate, we could just stop wasting everyone’s time and submit a guilty plea, negotiate a sentence right now. Is that what you want?” 

Aaron thought for a moment about the implications of these character witnesses, and he was truly considering it. What those people would say on the stand, the stories they would tell, he wasn’t sure he could bear it. They belonged to him, and he’d spent his entire life safeguarding them. 

“No,” he said finally, but no one in the room seemed entirely convinced. “I never laid a hand on Tamara Olsen either, she was the school nurse.” His voice dropped off after that and he stared down at his hands, feeling all of the eyes burning into him. The room felt hot all of a sudden, and his lungs seized in his chest momentarily. He coughed, forcing them to work again. “Just ask to interview their witnesses, then you’ll know everything. You don’t need me for that.”

After that, they weren’t able to get much more information out of Aaron that they could use so the lawyers left. Aaron asked Tara to have Penelope pull an inmate roster for the facility and find any other names like Rawdon’s that seemed out of place, he needed to know who was in this prison that he needed to watch out for. When it was just he and Dave left in the room, he leaned forward and put his head on the table, feeling the cool metal against his cheek and the crushing strain of his injured ribs. 

“I don’t think I can do this,” Aaron whispered, and Dave put his hand on Aaron’s back, let it rest between his shoulder blades, felt the steady beating of his heart, the slow expansion of his ribs. He was sure it wasn’t technically allowed, but it was in plain view of a camera and no one came and stopped him. Dave was fine with breaking rules. 

“You have to,” Dave replied. “We’re sure this is Peter Lewis, and we’re sure he’s got Jack. We need you with us, Aaron. We can’t catch him without you.” 

“Dave,” Aaron whispered, sitting himself upright, steadying himself against the back of the chair. He had a look of despair that made Dave feel lightheaded and vile, repulsive for even asking Aaron to subject himself to this. “I’ve spent every day putting as much space between that life and this one as I could manage. Protecting Sean from our father, and then Jack from me. I barely survived it the first time, I’m not sure I could do it again.”

“You have to try. You won’t be doing it alone, I’m right here with you, no matter what. Peter Lewis does not get to win.” 

The rest of the visit was silence, Dave had draped his arm over Aaron’s shoulders and the guards seemed not to care. Aaron just leaned against his friend, head resting on his chest and waited to be ripped out of the room, taken back to his cell where he could hopefully get some sleep before dealing with whatever horrors dinner would bring. He might try to rack up a few more injuries before his appointment in the morning, make it worth his while to show up. He wouldn’t mind being chained to a bed in the infirmary for a day or two. The mention of those names, ghosts from his past, had awakened a pure sense of self-destruction he’d been desperately burying for his entire adult life only to find that the self-worth he’d tried to put in its place was nothing but smoke and mirrors. It occurred to him, while he sat there scarcely breathing in his friend’s embrace, that if he just ceased to exist, they could forget about him, they could save Jack, let him rot for the murders and everyone’s lives would be better for it. Those people died on his behalf, whether he killed them or not, and they deserved some kind of justice, their families deserved closure. 

***

“Oh, sir,” Penelope gasped, scanning the inmate records. “Look at all of these…they don’t belong in there…” She’d been digging since Dave and Tara had returned from the prison. The inmate roster was wrong, and as she dug further into the system she could see where it had been hacked, people moved from max to gen, from protective custody to gen, names of inmates that were deceased still taking up space to make it look like it was overcrowded. Place holders, she figured, so they could move more of the real bad guys in there. “Do you think they’re being moved in…”

“For Hotch?” Derek asked, finishing her sentence. He was leaning over her shoulder, Dave nearby, and they both tried to keep up with what she was doing. “That’s gotta be it. And then it’ll just be the prison’s problem once Hotch is taken care of. Look at all these guys, Hotch put them all inside, or was at least responsible for their capture. It’s pretty amazing he’s only had problems with Rawdon so far, any one of them would probably be willing to spill some blood.”

“Ohmygod…” she whispered, staring at a name listed as pending transport. All color drained from her cheeks. “Vincent Perotta.” 

“Rossi, you gotta get me on his visitation schedule right away…” Derek’s voice was low, laced with an edge of fear. “You hear me? Right away, man.” 

“Consider it done.”

“I’m going to see if I can stop his transport…if Lewis can hack their system so can I,” Garcia muttered, her fingers flying over the keyboard at record speeds. Perotta was scheduled for transport in two days. “They can’t…they can’t put that monster in there…”


	7. Chapter 7

The bed was starting to feel more like his own, and he wasn't sure that was a good thing but it was a thing. Scales had been out in the yard when he returned, so he slipped into his blankets and fell asleep, utterly drained from meeting with his defense team. His chest ached and his lungs felt tight, it was hard to fall asleep but he managed. Feeling like a dead man walking helped. He wasn't sure how long he slept before Scales came back, he didn't even hear the door open and close, and Scales didn't try to wake him. He was out until the guards began shouting and the meal alerts went off – it was time for them to get into position and head to the mess hall. With some considerable effort, Aaron pulled himself up to his feet and stood beside Scales, blinking the sleep from his eyes. 

“Rawdon won't be botherin' you anymore,” Scales muttered under his breath, his lips barely moving, and Aaron peered at him out of the corner of his eye, saw a small bloodstain on his collar, and nodded in understanding. He hoped that this didn't come with some sort of agreement he didn't want to make, but Scales didn't strike him as the sort to play games. If he was going to expect something from Aaron in return, he'd say so. The doors up and down the cell block opened, and like a well rehearsed dance, the inmates filed out and down the corridor toward the mess hall. Aaron walked slowly, glad for the crush of bodies around him, he couldn't move any faster even if he'd wanted to. His muscles ached and his joints were sore, but he was upright. 

Dinner was overcooked spaghetti with a mess of red sauce dumped on top. The salad looked appealing, and the slice of wheat bread would sit in his stomach without complaint. He didn't take any dressing for his salad, and he traded his pile of spaghetti for another slice of bread to another man who sat at their table, he was quieter even than Aaron but he loved to eat. The way he stared hungrily at Aaron's tray reminded him of Jack when he was little, the way the kid always wanted whatever he had on his plate, even when they had the same meal. Aaron's stomach was iffy at the best of times, so he and the other inmate, Turtle he was called, struck an arrangement that seemed to make them both happy and keep them well fed. Aaron ripped his first slice of bread in half, picked up a cucumber and a tomato slice, folded them into the chunk of bread and took a bite. The other men at the table watched him curiously but said nothing. Scales began speaking while he chewed. 

“Rawdon and his goons are done with you, but there's more on the way. He said he was the least of your concerns, there's worse than him around here waiting their turn. 'Least I think that's what he said, hard to understand a man suddenly missing a few important teeth.” 

Aaron swallowed and nodded, thanked Scales for what he had done before creating another small vegetable sandwich. 

“It's nothing,” Scales replied, shoveling a pile of spaghetti with extra sauce into his mouth. “I like you Law Man. You keep to yourself, don't stick your nose in other's business. Hard to find a fella like you in here, I've collected all of 'em at this here table...hell, I might even miss ya when they decide you're no killer and let you back out.” 

“You gonna eat that brownie?” Turtle asked, and though Aaron wanted to say yes, he very much did plan to eat his brownie, he shook his head and slid his tray toward Turtle. He watched as Turtle picked up the brownie and set it atop his own, but as a show of thanks, he shoveled his syrupy canned peaches into the now empty slot with a smile. Aaron hated canned peaches, canned fruit in general, but he smiled and nodded anyway. He hadn't eaten canned fruit since he moved out of his mother's house. He slipped one onto his spork and held it to his lips, feeling the bile rise in his throat, his mind flashing back to sitting in his dark closet shoveling canned pears into his mouth one after another, trying to fill his stomach as quickly as he could after two days not being allowed to eat meals with the family because he'd told his mother that the tomato soup he'd had for lunch hurt his stomach. It made his stomach feel like it was on fire and he'd cried while he was out playing with his friends, which was quite a thing to do for a fifteen year old boy but his mother was hurt by his admission and his father figured that if he wanted to be picky, he could just sit and watch them eat instead. His mother didn't argue, he'd hurt her feelings. And so he sat there at the table with his empty plate and his water glass, and they ate in front of him and he just tried to think about anything but what was happening and how hungry he was. Sean, who was only five at the time, had snuck the can up to him after two days, he couldn't take it anymore, and it was a pop top so he didn't even need the can opener, but he sliced his finger on the lid in the dark and the pears tasted like tears and blood but the instant sugar rush stopped the shaking in his hands. Sean snuck him peaches later that night, and he ate them so fast he threw up afterward. He never told Sean that part. It was two more days before his dad allowed him to eat at the table again, but it was summer and Aaron knew where all of the apple trees and raspberry bushes were in the area so he made do, and he never told his mother again if something made him feel sick, he just handled it on his own.

With his mouth still full of the slimy peach, he felt something heavy slam into his back, crushing him against the table. He felt his already injured ribs groan and splinter under the weight, the edge of the table digging into his breast bone. The peach flew out of his mouth as he sputtered and gasped for air. The man who landed on him looked like a linebacker, and the man who shoved him was even bigger. Aaron's mouth opened and closed, his eyes squeezed shut tight at the sheer pain in his crushed chest while the big man pulled himself up and ran full force at the other, ramming him and sending him flying into another table. Before the entire mess hall erupted into a fight, Scales and his friends scrambled around the table, grabbed Aaron and dragged him out of there as fast as they could. 

“Get him to the infirmary,” the guard hollered and Scales pushed one of Aaron's arms up over his shoulders, Turtle the other and they moved themselves away from the chaos. The other two men, Chance and Abe, lead the way, making sure their path was clear. Scales wasn't sure if the hit on Aaron had been intentional or just a painful coincidence but he wasn't taking any chances. 

“No infirmary,” Aaron groaned. “Please.” 

“Now you listen here, I respect your right to do as you wish, but there's blood comin' outta your mouth and I'm not gonna be involved in whatever death wish you have. You can kill yourself on your own time.” 

“I bit my tongue, I'm okay...” Aaron gasped, and he was telling the truth but Scales considered it for a minute before stopping and leaning Aaron against the wall. He had bitten his tongue, but he knew that wasn't where all of the blood was coming from. Aaron slumped over, hugging his arms around his midsection, and furiously tried to catch whatever breath he could. His lungs were on fire. 

“Why're you so worried about going to the infirmary?” Turtle asked, and he had a softer way about him than Scales did. Aaron glanced up at him as he stood there, doubled over in pain, and wiped the blood from his chin, considering his options. “You think someone's gonna hurt you in there?”

“I think...” he rasped, swallowing a mouthful of blood. His stomach churned at the intrusion. “I think someone wants me in there pretty bad.” 

“Okay,” Scales replied, glancing at his partners. “You got a point there, Law Man. It does seem like someone's tryin' to get you in there, if they wanted you dead they'd already have you dead. You think you'll make it until morning? I'll press that panic button so fast it'll make your head spin if I think you're dyin' on me.” 

“I'll...” Aaron tried, wheezing. His lungs felt wet, the air strangled out of him. He couldn't pull in his breath, he felt lightheaded. “I'll be okay.” Scales rolled his eyes and shrugged, approaching Aaron to help him away from the wall but Turtle had him on his own. He was bigger than Aaron, and he walked him slowly, gently down the hall with Scales and the others leading the way. Aaron had the strangest sensation that his feet were hovering over the floor, he was light as air. 

“Sorry about your peaches,” Turtle said softly, and Aaron smiled a goofy, dizzy smile. 

“S'ok.”

***

It was the sound of something thick and wet splattering against concrete that woke Scales, and he sat upright in the pitch black of the cell. He squinted into the dark, forcing his eyes to adjust to the slips of moonlight pouring in through the bars, and he heard rustling and groaning from the bed on the other wall. Without a second thought, without being able to see a thing, he slammed his fist into the panic button and said a prayer – he could smell the blood, he didn't need to see it. 

There were only minutes that passed between his hitting the button and two guards making their way down the corridor toward the cell. 

“What's the deal, Scales?” they asked, but as they shone their flashlights into the cell, they saw immediately the blood and vomit on the floor, and Aaron hanging over the side of his bed, ready to add more. Scales sat on his bed, he was talking to Aaron, muttering prayers, calling him an idiot. Through the rush of pounding blood behind his ears, Aaron heard very little of it, but he was strangely comforted by the way Scales seemed to regard him, it reminded him of Dave and Derek, the way they took care of him but also made sure he knew how very stupid he was. The guards pulled him to his feet and drug him out of the cell, they weren't gentle but they were fast, it felt like no time at all before he was being chained to a bed in the infirmary by one guard while another called for the emergency doctor. 

“We got a bleeder,” the guard said into the phone, and then it was silent and they waited and just hoped Aaron didn't die on their watch. The paperwork would be a bitch. 

***

“Where are we going?” Jack asked, buckling his seat belt. The woman beside him smiled and put her gloved hands on the steering wheel – they were in a new car, a van this time, and it was pitch black outside. They'd eaten dinner with the people in the house, Jack wasn't sure they were a family as such but there was a man and a woman and so many children. No one talked, not even the grown ups. Everyone just seemed to be waiting for something or someone. 

“It's an adventure, Jack! Don't you like adventures?” she asked, grinning at him. Even in the dark he could see that her eyes were wild. She ran her hands over the steering wheel, familiarized herself with all of the knobs and buttons, and pulled her long dark hair back into a pony tail. He shook his head. 

“Not really,” he mumbled, hugging his bag close to him. It was all he had left of his home, of his life. “I really want to go home.” 

“We're a team now, Jack. I'm taking you on this adventure and at the end of it you'll have a new home! A real family!” 

“I don't even know your name...” he said, and she looked over at him and smiled. 

“I'm Sue,” she replied and her voice was so syrupy sweet that he couldn't help but smile. “Don't you want to meet Michael? He can't wait to finally meet you! You're going to go live with him and his family. His dad never goes away on business or gets shot...his dad's never murdered anyone, Jack. And his mom is alive. She wants to be your mom too.” 

***

The infirmary was freezing. Aaron understood why it was always cold but it didn't help, and he supposed losing as much blood as he had wasn't doing him any favors. He hoped Scales wasn't too upset with him for making such a mess of their room in the middle of the night. They were preparing to take him to the hospital, he was bleeding too much and they needed a better facility than they had available in the prison. He was glad, he'd get out for a little while, and if they'd wanted him in the infirmary then he'd at least one upped them this time. If he had any skill in this world it was being a magnet for injury.

“Hold on big guy,” the doctor said, leaning over him, checking his eyes for dilation. “You're getting a trip to the E.R. Little taste of freedom, huh?” Aaron wanted to laugh, thinking about the fact that his hands and feet were chained to the stretcher, and as much as he wanted to curl around the agonizing pain in his chest, he couldn't move. He let out a choked cough and the doctor pressed his finger to Aaron's chin and tilted his head to the side, letting the blood run down his cheek and into a towel waiting to sop it up, hoping he wouldn't aspirate before the ambulance got there. “Have you ever been in an ambulance before?”

Aaron did laugh this time, and he got a small thrill out of how it sounded, so wet and thick, and he knew it must have looked utterly deranged. But he laughed anyway, because it was funny. “Yeah,” he rasped, blinking slowly. “Once or twice.”

The doctor didn't know whether to laugh or be frightened, but the man on the stretcher looked genuinely amused. “This is just old hat to you, huh?”

“Something...like...that...” Aaron whispered, spitting more blood from the back of his mouth, trying to stifle the cough that would blow his chest wide open. He did wish the ambulance would hurry, his throat was raw and painful and he'd really like to stop tasting blood. He would rather have the canned peaches. 

***

The hospital was never quiet, but it was particularly busy and Aaron could tell. He was still conscious, which may have been a first in an ambulance, at least one he wasn't personally driving. He watched the fluorescent lights fly by overhead while they forced the stretcher down the hallway, weaving through people, he tried to count them but they were all blurring together. 

“Doctor Morgan is going to meet us in OR2, she’s waiting for us now,” the nurse at his head said, and he smiled, he knew Dr. Morgan. He let himself slip away, eyes drifting closed, knowing he was at least in good hands.

***

“Excuse me?” a man asked, shielding his face from the cameras above. He wore a cap, and bright blue gloves, but he looked nice. He smiled a lot. “Was that man...was he from the prison? I don't feel comfortable with prisoners in the operating room while my wife is back there.” 

The girl at the desk stifled a yawn, it was the middle of the night and she didn't recognize this man. There were two other surgeries going on, but she couldn't remember much about the patients, she didn't have their information yet. “I'm sorry, sir, but we have to take care of people in emergencies. That man didn't look like he was going anywhere and there was an armed guard with him.” 

“What if he's...faking? What if he kills people in there?” and he made a sound, like he couldn't breathe and pulled out what looked like an inhaler. He put it to his mouth, as though he was going to take a puff, and she looked down at her computer at the same time. The hiss of the spray happened fast, but she noticed it had a funny smell and looked up in time to see tiny particles floating before her face and suddenly the world looked blurry and the lights were dancing before her eyes. She smiled but said nothing. “I need to know his name. Can you tell me his name?”

“Aaron Hotchner,” the girl said, tilting her head to the side. Somewhere inside of her she knew she shouldn’t be saying anything, she was violating HIPAA, she was breaking the rules, and this man looked suddenly dangerous. It was his eyes. But she was disconnected from her body, and her mouth was moving without her control. 

“Good. Good. If he's admitted, I need to know his room number. Can you help me with that?”

“Yes,” she replied, nodding. She felt like a prisoner in her body, screaming to be let free, but she smiled and her eyes looked vacant as she scanned the lobby. The man had disappeared. 

***

“Derek? It’s me, listen - Hotch is here, he’s in the OR, I’m getting ready to operate now. I don’t have time to answer questions, I need you to get to the hospital ASAP. Meet me in the doctor’s lounge, you know the code.” Savannah clicked her phone off and dropped it into her locker, not waiting for her husband to say a word in answer. She knew he’d have to find a way to take care of Hank, find someone to watch him, but she also knew it was too important not to call. He may have left the job to be with them, but his friends were still his friends. She set about scrubbing in for a surgery she’d never wanted to perform, hoping he’d find a way to get down there. It was one thing to operate on strangers, but quite another to operate on one of your husband’s best friends.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I dropped the ball cross-posting, I put these last few on Tumblr and spaced off throwing them over here but the story is finished so you get 4 chapters in one day!

“Where is Hank?” Savannah asked, rummaging through the bins of scrubs quickly. Her fingers flew through the tags, trying to match sizes, find something that would fit her husband. Scrubs that would somehow make him fit in among the hospital staff, though she found it doubtful it would fool many. He didn’t have the demeanor of someone who worked in a hospital, he was hardened in different ways and too soft in others. Still, she had to try. 

“Reid came over. He was the only person I knew would still be awake. I mean Hank’s asleep but Reid’s there, at our house. What’s going on?” 

Savannah shoved some scrubs into Derek’s arms and squared off with him. “I know we could both get in big trouble for this, but your friend just went through surgery for internal bleeding, pneumothorax and several broken bones in his hand – some of the injuries were not new. I see these types of injuries in inmates all the time, they wheel them in, let us treat them, and wheel them right back out so I doubt he’ll be here long but he needs you and I know you gave up that life for us but I can’t live with myself if you don’t help him right now.” 

“You’re sure he’s here?”

“I operated on him myself, Derek. I’ll tell you where he’s at, you just have to pretend to be his nurse. We can get the guard out if we play our cards right, you can have some time alone with him. He’ll be awake soon. I know you and he didn’t always see eye to eye, but I also know if he needs anyone right now…it’s you.”

“What if he needs a real nurse?” Derek asked, concerned. “I can’t help him, don’t you think they’ll be suspicious?” Savannah shrugged. She watched her husband slip into the scrubs, pulling them over top of his street clothes, and sighed. He never could see what he meant to Aaron, she knew. After he left, Penelope had told her that Aaron seemed listless, confused, vulnerable. Of course he recovered quickly, he always did, but Penelope had seen it and somehow Derek hadn’t thought to seek it out, to make sure Aaron knew they were still friends even if they weren’t side by side anymore by force. Savannah saw this as an opportunity, a chance for Derek to remind his friend that the years they spent side by side, anticipating the other’s every move, wasn’t in vain. That bond would be forever. 

“Press the call button and I’ll come. If the guard asks, just say you need a second person in the room with you for liability. A lot of falls lately, your risk manager is up your ass.”

“You really think this will work?”

“This is an opportunity, Derek. We have to use it.”

The walk to Aaron’s room brought Derek back to his days working undercover, and he tried to settle back into the routine of being himself but also not himself. He nodded and smiled at hospital staff walking by, affecting an air of confidence, like he belonged there. That confidence dwindled when he gripped the handle and depressed it, pushing into Aaron’s room. It was cold and quiet, a big change from the noise of the hallway, the announcements and the muzak and the feet and voices and machines. He noted the chill first, knew how much Aaron would hate it. He’d always kept his office sweltering, even if he had to maintain old space heaters against bureau policy to do so. On the jet, Derek had stocked a few extra blankets, stashed them in a cubby beneath a seat only he knew, and the only time he got into that stash was when Aaron slept – few and far between were those times, but he knew. Somehow he knew. If Aaron was exhausted enough to sleep on the jet instead of doing his paperwork, he needed that sleep desperately and extra blankets would keep him there. Derek liked small details, he thrived there. Aaron would never know who it was that threw the extra blankets on him that kept him asleep from California to Virginia, he’d probably guess it was Rossi and be okay with it, and Derek never needed the credit. 

“Who are you?”

“Nurse,” Derek said, approaching the bed, waving his name badge quickly at the guard. “Just here doing my rounds, man.” The guard shrugged and looked back at the Martha Stewart magazine he was thumbing through mindlessly, trying not to fall asleep. It wasn’t helping, though, the magazine was worse than the quiet. Derek stood over Aaron and fumbled his way through checking vitals, trying to copy what Savannah had shown him, but it didn’t seem to make a difference to the guard at all, he was barely awake. 

“Hey…” Derek smiled down at Aaron as his eyes fluttered open, blinking hard against the harsh lights in the room. Aaron’s face read exhaustion and pain, but he didn’t speak. He just stared up at Derek, unsure that what he was seeing was real, unable to trust his eyes. “There you are. Glad to see you, buddy.” Derek tried to play it cool, like he didn’t know Aaron, but the gratitude he had for his wife and seeing his friend waking up, even if he was chained to the bed, was almost too much. He glanced over at the guard and saw him sleeping now, snoring still holding the magazine open to a page of Halloween themed treats, so he reached up and pulled the curtain closed around the bed for privacy, figuring he could just say it was for patient modesty if necessary. The guard didn’t seem worried that Aaron was a flight risk or a danger, but Derek figured that he was probably not supposed to be sleeping anyway. The thought crossed Derek’s mind that he could pick the locks easily and get his friend out of there without anyone knowing, but he thought better of it. 

“What are you…” Aaron whispered, licking his lips. His mouth was tingly, but he didn’t taste blood anymore. Derek shook his head and reached out, cupping Aaron’s hand in his. He studied his friend for a moment, the angry bruises on his face, the soft cast that held his left arm from his elbow to his fingers, his bare chest covered in a map of gruesome bruises and stitches beneath bandages. As if he had room for more scars. 

“My name is Derek and I’m your nurse tonight. Let me know if you need anything okay?” he said, loud enough for the guard to hear if he cared, and then in a hushed voice he continued. “Savannah took good care of you man. They’re not gonna be keeping you here long but I’ll be with you the whole time. I’m not about to leave you.” He ran his thumb gently along Aaron’s knuckles, watching the look that came over his face at the touch, at the action, and he smiled. Aaron’s eyes drifted shut, he couldn’t fight the drugs and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Derek was there, he was safe. Slowly, not sure if he should or not, Derek pulled the blanket up over his friend and tucked him in tight. He knew there was no way Aaron would want anyone seeing him exposed like that, and he knew how cold he got. Derek wasn’t a nurse, he didn’t know the rules, he just wanted to make his friend comfortable. 

Outside of the room, a man lurked. He kept his cap pulled low over his eyes, and he paced by the window to the room, back and forth, waiting to see someone other than the sleeping guard. There were moments he thought he could use the sleeping man, moments he considered slipping into the room and taking his chances, but he didn’t know who was behind the curtain with Agent Hotchner. He could see feet and they didn’t look small. The curtain rustled, and out stepped a face that struck him with a bolt of fear – of all the people to see there, Derek Morgan hadn’t even occurred to him. The man felt rage, boiling anger and he pumped his fists at his sides as he stalked down the hallway, away from Aaron’s room. 

***

“Where are we?” Jack asked, blinking his eyes open. He hadn’t realized he’d fallen asleep, but the drive was so long and so boring. Sue didn’t like to listen to music, just the soft sounds of the highway rattling along beneath their tires. She looked over at him and smiled.

“Mississippi. We’re almost there!” He’d never been to Mississippi before, he’d never really wanted to. 

“I need to pee,” he said softly and she shrugged, told him they weren’t stopping and he’d have to hold it because they were already late meeting Michael’s family. Jack squeezed his legs together tight and focused on trying to hold it, but the more he thought about it the worse it got. 

“We got ten minutes, don’t you dare piss in this car or you’ll be cleaning it up.” 

It was ten agonizing minutes, and the second he hopped out of the van he rushed into some nearby bushes and relieved himself. He stayed in the bushes after he was finished and watched as Sue pulled off her gloves, rubbed at a long, angry scar on her palm, and threw her gloves into her purse before pulling out a new pair. She spoke with a woman who had stepped out of a car parked nearby, and before Jack understood what was going on, there were arms around him, lifting him into the air kicking and screaming but Sue rushed over and shushed him, told him it was alright, these people would take him to Michael and she had to go back to Virginia to finish her job. He was thrown into the back seat of the van, and Sue took the car the woman had gotten out of and vanished. 

“What’s going on? Who are you? I want to go home, I miss my dad!” he cried out as hands buckled him in, hands belonging to a man whose face he hadn’t even seen yet. Soon there were two people in the front seats and they were leaving the parking lot. 

“You’re never gonna see your dad again. Now, not another word, kid.” 

***

Scales hung around at the bars to his cell, peering down the corridor as the newest inmate was shuffled toward him. The man would be his new neighbor, and he looked like a big tough guy, the kind of guy Scales couldn’t stand. The new inmate stared at Scales with a look that made him shiver a little, stared with dead eyes right at him. The guard pushed him into the cell and closed the door behind him, and the man stayed standing at the bars long after they left. 

“Agent Hotchner?” the man asked in a low monotone. Scales looked over, tried to see into the cell beside his. “Agent Hotchner?”

“He ain’t here,” Scales muttered, sliding up beside the wall, out of sight. “What do you want with him?”

“That isn’t your concern.” 

***

It had been three days, and each day the man next door had called out for Agent Hotchner, only to find silence. Scales wasn’t speaking to him any longer, but he’d found out all he needed to know about the man called Perotta and was more than a little worried about his new friend’s safety. On the evening of the third day after Aaron’s trip to the emergency room, Scales returned from dinner to find his cell-mate sleeping in bed. The guard shut the door with a loud clang, but Aaron didn’t move. 

“You really sleeping?” Scales asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper as he stood above Aaron, who still made no move, not even a twitch. “Listen, you idiot, you should be in the infirmary not here. This guy next door, big fella, he’s askin’ about you. What I heard about this guy sounds like you’re in a lot of trouble.” 

Aaron’s eyes opened, just slits there in the dark, and Scales thought he looked like the most miserable person he’d ever laid eyes on. He sighed, cursed the fact that he’d somehow started to care about this big oaf, and sat down on the floor beside Aaron’s bed. 

“Why’re you back? Last I heard, you was knockin’ on hell’s door beggin’ em to let you in.”

“They didn’t want to…pay the guard overtime…” Aaron rasped, smirking as best he could. In his drugged out state, he did find it funny. They were keeping him well medicated so he’d lay still, it was the best they could seem to manage for him. He hated it, but there was no fighting it. He was coming to terms with his complete lack of autonomy. At least nothing hurt, he was thankful for that. He may come out of it fighting opioid withdrawals but for the time being, he was enjoying a complete lack of pain – if he was being honest, it had been years since he’d felt that way. Not since before Foyet, at least. Maybe longer, but that was a turning point in his journey with chronic pain. “If I die, it’s on your watch now.”

“Like hell it is,” Scales snapped, but he was smiling. God help him, he liked this guy, he reminded him of his own son. Pig headed and capable but self-destructive, laced with an edge of daring and valiant. He never acted on his own behalf, Scales could tell Law Man didn’t seem to care much about his own well being but if someone he cared about was in trouble, he’d put his life on the line for them without a second thought and certainly without considering how they felt about it. That sort of man didn’t pop up around these parts often, but when they did, he saw them, he clung to them, tried to preserve what was left of their souls. He took it as his penance for the wrongs he’d done, if he could help them, maybe his soul still had a chance on the other side too. 

“You listen here, Law Man,” Scales said, leaning closer to the bed now. “You try to die on me, I’ll personally knock on the devil’s door. You won’t be let off so easy, you got unfinished business top side. You hear me?”

Aaron didn’t respond, but he whimpered a little, a soft helpless noise as the pain broke through momentarily. Broke through the numb haze and coursed through him. The doctor would be through soon with more drugs, he was sure of it, but in his moment of clarity he saw Derek, he remembered the way Derek had held his hand in the hospital and he clung to that. 

“Aaron,” Scales said, softer this time. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” Aaron replied, and he never wanted to hear Scales say his real name again. It hurt too much. 

***

“Agent Rossi!” Garcia shouted, rushing into his office without so much as knocking or checking to see if he was on the phone. She didn’t care. Thankfully he was there, and he was just working on what looked like some case files. “I have an alert set up, sir, a facial recognition alert, on Peter Lewis. I just got a hit on him at Bethesda General Hospital and I went and looked at it. He was there, in the hospital, three nights ago…he was there and Hotch was there and Derek was there…I don’t know what’s going on, Agent Rossi. Why would Derek not call us?”

“Call Morgan, ask him to come talk to us. I’m sure he had his reasons.” Dave seemed unenthusiastic about all of it, completely distracted, and she couldn’t understand why. She’d just told him that Aaron was in the hospital, that Derek and Peter Lewis were there too, and he seemed like he barely heard her. Or barely cared. He put his pen down on his desk and raked his hands down over his face. 

“Sir?” Garcia asked, approaching slowly. “What are you working on? Can I help?”

“I’m combing through Aaron’s medical history. The lawyers spoke to that school nurse this afternoon and she told us we’d see what she saw if we looked hard enough. Her testimony is based on her interpretation of Aaron’s…of what she saw, things she dealt with at school. There are police reports or disciplinary files that line up with at least half of the entries in the nurse’s log, and every hospital visit.” He looked sick even saying the words aloud. 

“Police reports, sir?”

“Let me know when Morgan gets here, please.”


	9. Chapter 9

“Hey, mama, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Derek said, seated in Dave’s office the following morning. “I couldn’t.” He sipped his coffee, avoided her piercing glare.

“Why not? He was there…he was right there and we didn’t even know…” she muttered, wearing all of her hurt on her sleeve. “We always see him in the hospital.” Derek just sighed and shook his head, looking to Dave for assistance, he had to understand but he was just staring at Derek too. 

“Guys, he wasn’t allowed visitors, you know how that works…” he began, pleading with them now to hear him out. They both had a look of betrayal painted on their features, but he wasn’t sure where Dave’s came from. The man had to know. “Savannah could lose her job, her license, for calling me. I had to dress in scrubs and pretend to be a nurse just to see him. What we did…you guys would have lost your jobs too. Come on now. I was just trying to help.”

Dave softened after that, but Penelope still looked so hurt. He hated seeing her this way but he knew he was right and she was going to have to see it too. “How was he?” Dave asked, finally snapping out of his trance. 

“Drugged up, had some pretty intense surgery. It was bad, and they took him back so quickly that…I just don’t know. I stayed as long as I could. Nothing much I could do but sit with him.” Derek played with the hem of his shirt, tapped on his thighs, anything to distract from the disappointment and betrayal on Penelope’s face. 

“No, what you did…” Dave began, shooting Penelope a look that Derek couldn’t read. “You saved his life. Garcia set up a facial recognition something or other…”

“It alerts me anytime Peter Lewis’ face appears on a camera, and he was seen on camera in that hospital twice – once in the ER waiting area, once in the ICU. He knew Hotch was there.” 

“What?! And you didn’t call me? We could have ended this!”

“I didn’t see it right away, I set it up to pull days of footage from all over the DC area, it took a while to finish…and, if you recall, I didn’t even know you were there yet because you didn’t call either.”

“Alright you two. Enough. Derek, you saved his life by just being there. We’ll catch Lewis, but at least he’s safe.” Dave was looking right at Derek now, and there was something else there now that Derek couldn’t place. Some kind of deep pain, or guilt, a shadow of something unmistakably wrong. 

“Yeah, well, he’s four days out from a surgery that opened up his chest and he’s laying in a prison so I’m not sure safe is the right word, but I guess it’s all we can hope for.”

***

The drugs had worn off and all that was left was pain, the depths of which Aaron hadn’t ever encountered. There was no adrenaline to ward it off, no comforting touch from a loved one to guide him through it, just a cold mattress and paper thin blankets and the sounds of Vincent Perotta taunting him from the cell next door.

“I know you’re there, Agent Hotchner, and I know you can hear me,” he would say, and Aaron just lay awake listening to him. “I’m a patient man and I have all the time in the world.”

It was dinner time, and Scales was working in the kitchen with Turtle. The two of them had conspired nightly, since Aaron’s return, to bring him sustenance in the form of apple juice and jello, for which he was eternally grateful. He hadn’t been able to be out of bed longer than just to use the toilet and even that was almost too much at times. He could feel the incision acutely when he stood, like the stitches might just snap and let his chest fly open, exposing him and his pain to the world. He’d dreamed about it, watched it happen every time he closed his eyes. He supposed it had more to do with what he knew his team were doing on the outside, digging into every dark crevice of his life, poking and prodding things better left alone than it did his actual sutures but the pain was the same. 

He rolled over, curled around himself and closed his eyes. He’d done so much sleeping but none of it was good sleep, none of it was restful. There were nightmares, terrible dreams that bled into the waking times. The gunshot that ripped through Derek, spraying his warm blood across Aaron’s face, it had never happened but there was no telling Aaron that, even still. It flashed every time he looked at him. Every single time, and he had to remind himself it wasn’t real. Not real. His stomach growled, he shivered and he tried to sleep through the soft monotone of Vincent Perotta calling to him. 

***

His new home was a big brown house in the woods, idyllic in every way to a young boy who wanted to run free. He stared up at the windows that looked like a smiling face, and then couple who stood at the doorway smiled at him. 

“You must be Jack!” the man called, waving him over. The people in the van shoved him toward them, told him to smile, he was home now. Got huffy when he didn’t thank them, when he had tears in his eyes instead of a smile on his face. The man from the house approached him and his eyes seemed kinder than the other people. “You’ll be happy here soon. I promise.” Jack heard wheels on gravel, watched as the van drove away and left him there with people he didn’t know at a house he’d never seen before, and he had no idea where he was. All he could think as he let the man lead him into the house was that his father had taught him better. 

Inside, the house was lit brightly by the sun through those big windows. The furniture was old but well maintained, like something out of a magazine from a long time ago, or his mom’s baby book. That’s what it looked like, the furniture in his grandparents’ home. The man lead him through the front room and into the kitchen, asked if he was hungry after his long trip, and the woman busied herself with washing some dishes as they spoke. They asked Jack question after question about himself, questions like they really wanted to know him, wanted to take care of him and make him happy. He sat at the table, it was small and made of dark wood in almost pristine condition. The woman gave him a sandwich, peanut butter and jelly with the crust cut off, and told him that the other kids were playing outside, that they’d be back soon for lunch but he looked so hungry she wanted to let him have a head start. She was preparing a pile of the sandwiches and he wondered how many children they had and if the children were like him, belonging to other families or if he was the only one. 

“Tomorrow is my birthday,” Jack offered, taking a bite of his sandwich. He wasn’t sure what made him say it, maybe he felt more comfortable, maybe he just wanted someone to say something nice. “I’m going to be twelve.”

“Well we’ll have to throw you a party won’t we?”

***

Aaron was alone in his cell now, he’d been back more than a week and still felt terrible. He was being pumped full of antibiotics for an infection, he was weak and tired and still in almost unbearable pain at times, but he could stand now and he liked to pace his cell. He hadn’t been outside of those walls except to shower since he’d been in the hospital. Pacing his cell, the incredible concentration and strain of putting his feet on the floor and forcing them to move, was all that was keeping his mind from snapping entirely. He knew Dave and his legal team were making preparations for his trial to begin, had met with the prosecution’s witnesses, had an appointment with him the next day if he could keep himself upright for it. They needed to prepare him to take the stand, go through mock questions the prosecution would have, a simple fact that was dominating his every thought. There were visitation requests from Penelope and Emily, but he had refused both, he was too sick to leave his cell. Turtle had slipped him a cherry jello and a small carton of chocolate milk and it was the highlight of his day. 

***

Sue stood outside of FBI Headquarters in Quantico, VA with a dead look in her eyes as she stared at the building. She just stood there, and when security was alerted to her presence, she asked to speak to Agent David Rossi. Asked for him by name. Said he’d know exactly who she was, extended her hands to be zip-tied and cuffed as a show of submission. Dave met her in an interrogation room in the basement of the building, stalking through the dark down the corridor, past the armed guards. 

“Sue Walsh,” he said, entering the room and closing the door behind him. “No way you should be a free woman.”

“Overcrowding is a bitch, huh?” Her face was blank, he couldn’t read her. She sat with her hands bound together, placed in front of her on the table. He could see the scar on her palm, remembered the way she’d gone from sweet to enraged, the way she’d lunged at Aaron and decked him with those small hands. “How is Agent Hotchner?”

“What do you know about Agent Hotchner?” 

“I know that you’ll want to hear what I have to say, and you’ll want to treat me very well. I know that the information I have could free him…could save his son…or if you want to play your games with me, Agent Rossi, I’m happy to let him sit in prison. You’ll never prove he’s innocent without me.” Her southern drawl was pronounced, syrupy, thick. She was laying it on, playing the part, but he knew she was telling the truth and he couldn’t figure out, for the life of him, why she’d be here willing to spill it. 

“What do you want?” he asked, seating himself now at the table, a show of compliance, that he was willing to talk. 

“I want to see my baby. I want to hold my baby, Agent Rossi.” Dave stared at her, he and Aaron had been so sure she’d been lying about being pregnant. 

“Your baby?”

“My…baby. I had him in prison, but they took him from me Agent. They took him from my arms and I want him back now.”

“What’s his name? How old is he? Where did they take him? I need information.” 

“His name is Jacob, he’s three now. They put him in foster care, I tried to find him and I couldn’t. You find him or you’ll never get your people back. And you’d better hurry, I heard that Agent Hotchner is having a tough time in there.” 

***

Emily and Garcia had been trying to find Jack with no luck. The trail of Michael went cold as soon as Jack ran off, and they’d located the car he left in dumped in a field in West Virginia, not a print in sight save for Jack’s. 

“How could someone just take an eleven year old boy and disappear? Completely vanish?” 

“Oh, Em, it’s easier than you think.” 

“That girl in there with Rossi doesn’t seem smart enough to have planned any of this. Do you think she’s here because Lewis made her come? To distract us? Or is she telling the truth? She’s a pathological liar and a sociopath according to her file, what’s to say she’s telling the truth now?” 

“I pulled her records, she did have a baby three years ago in prison, she’s telling the truth about that. They took him and put him in foster care because the father was deemed unfit, but where he is now…I don’t know. He vanished too. I’ll find him, it’s just going to take some doing – it’s a lot of sealed records, state lines, red tape.”

“And when you do…what if he’s got a good life? We can’t just take him and give him to that woman.”

“Emily…” Penelope pleaded, whining, but she knew Emily was right. They couldn’t do that, not even to save Aaron and Jack. 

***

Aaron leaned heavily against the bars of his cell, feeling the bone-deep pain in his chest as he tried to breathe. “Perotta?” he called, resting his cheek on the cool metal. He was done hiding, done listening to the taunts. 

“Agent Hotchner,” came the voice from next door, and Aaron could feel how very close he was. A chill slithered up his spine. “Did you miss me?”

“I forgot you the moment I walked away.” Aaron was lying, and Perotta knew it, but this was a game and both were now willing participants.

“Do you remember what it was you said to me?” Perotta asked, and Aaron swallowed thickly against the nausea that came with standing. The antibiotics were making him feel worse than anything. His chest felt hot at the incision, burning even. He looked back at his bed, wondered if he could even make it before he collapsed, but he stayed against those bars and spoke softly. 

“No,” he lied. How could he forget? It had been a rare moment when he’d let his walls come down. He considered it a lapse in judgment, one he hadn’t made again, one he’d been so careful of since that moment. As he’d spoken with Perotta, he felt something deep in his soul stirring, a kinship with a monster, knowing beyond reason that he could just as easily been the one in shackles. The difference, he knew, was Haley – her love had saved him, at least for a time. She’d convinced him he was worthy of life, of good things, of love. For all of his despair, all of the years of torment that came after the dissolution of his marriage, he was better for having had it. 

“You told me that children who grew up in abusive households often grow up to be monsters, but some of them grow up to catch those monsters. Do you recall?”

“Yes,” Aaron said, unable to find a way to lie convincingly as he slid down the bars and sat on the floor. He pulled his legs up, hung his heavy, dizzy head between his knees and forced himself to remember how to breathe. He needed water, needed his bed, needed to sleep. “I remember.”

“What you meant by that was not lost on me like it was on your friends, Agent Hotchner. I understood you plainly while those simpletons that surround you thought you were speaking in useless platitudes. But something has been bothering me recently, and I just needed to get an answer to my question. Which one are you really?”


	10. Chapter 10

“Dave, don’t look at me like that,” Aaron muttered, toying with the frayed ends of the cotton inside of his cast. It was already dirty hardly a week into wearing it, dirty and frayed but it beat the hell out of a filthy strip of gauze. He was acutely aware of the pins in his hand, the intense itch just out of reach, the way his fingers ached to move. Pain he could do, it was a familiar old friend, but the itching was enough to drive him mad. When he was a child, he’d broken his arm falling off of the porch railing, one of the only times he’d had a trip to the hospital for something unrelated to his home life. He’d just been a silly eight year old who thought he could turn the porch railing into a balance beam, and as it turned out, he could not. He would run out into the back yard every morning and break a twig off of a tree or a bush, whittle it down until it was perfect, and use it to scratch inside his cast for hours. It was pure heaven. There were no scratching tools in prison. 

“Like what?” Dave asked, but he still had the look on his face. The one that was so utterly, painfully sad and apologetic that Aaron couldn’t bear to see it long. The look that said he didn’t know who he was talking to anymore. 

“I ate fruit cocktail today. First solid food I’ve had in a week. The kind with the grapes and the cherries. I think mine had extra cherries. The chef might be sweet on me.” Aaron smirked, but Dave didn’t find it very amusing. Prison was bringing out a side in his friend that worried him, made him squirm a little. 

Dave watched his friend, a look of concern painted on his face. He couldn’t shake it. “Is that…a good thing?” He honestly didn’t know. Aaron shrugged and picked at his fingernail, watching the way his fingers twitched every time the deep itch struck. He wanted to bash his arm against a rock, crack the cast wide open like a coconut shell and tear at the skin inside, but he just forced an odd half smile and imagined the perfect twig. 

“Just a thing.” Aaron was sitting, hunched over beside Dave in a wheelchair, he wasn’t able to walk far unassisted and the guards didn’t want to take any chances, they’d already had enough paperwork to last them a lifetime on this guy. He hadn’t been eating, he was too weak to be in the yard, so he just stayed in his cell. The infection hadn’t cleared up after one round of antibiotics, and he was working on round two – his body was ravaged, he was spent. The lawyers hadn’t shown up yet, Dave asked for a few minutes alone with Aaron to privately go over the things he’d uncovered, but looking at Aaron now, he wasn’t sure how much of it even mattered. 

“Aaron…” Dave started, but Aaron looked up at him suddenly and he stopped. It was like staring into the face of a different person. The man he’d known forever, the man he considered his closest friend, wasn’t there. Not really. And maybe it was a few weeks in prison, maybe it was the drugs Lewis had dosed him with, maybe it was something else entirely, but Dave didn’t see much of Aaron anymore. 

“Vincent Perotta is in here now, you know that? Morgan told me he was being transferred in while I was in the hospital, and I got lucky enough that he moved in right next door. Sits right on the other side of that wall and just talks to me. I don’t think he sleeps. This morning he told me a story about his dad that made anything he did look tame. Made my dad look like father of the year.” 

“We have a lead,” Dave offered, trying to change the subject, to get Aaron to focus, be present. “Sue Walsh is in custody right now, she says she knows where Jack is and how to prove you’re innocent. She won’t give us any details until we’ve found her child. Prentiss and Garcia are working on finding her boy right now. We’re close Aaron, but we need to have a plan in case this goes to trial, we need to buy some time. Your defense team wants to link every incidence of violence predicated by the prosecution to either a hospital record or a police report for domestic violence. To prove that each violent outburst of yours was as a direct result of trauma.” 

“If my innocence hangs by a thread held by Sue Walsh, forgive me if I’m not overly optimistic, Dave. That woman tried to take my head off in a fit of rage. Focus on Jack, forget about me.” 

“Aaron, today is Jack’s birthday. He’s twelve now, and I know he’s out there scared and missing you. He needs you to fight.”

“No,” Aaron sighed, finally making eye contact with Dave. “He needs you to find him, and to keep him away from me. The best birthday gift he could receive would be to know I won’t be ruining his life anymore.”

***

When Jack woke up in a strange bed, in a strange bedroom, in a strange house, he worried. He’d never woken up worried on his birthday before, but it was overwhelming now. There were three other children asleep down the hall in their own rooms, and they all seemed happy but there was something wrong, something dark. A home with so many children who didn’t belong there, children who appeared on a doorstep in the middle of the woods and were taken in and loved, that didn’t just happen. Jack had lived with his father long enough to know things like that just…didn’t happen. Nonetheless, he found himself getting dressed in clothes that didn’t belong to him and walking through the house that was not his and into a party that was thrown for him by a family that didn’t even know him. There were streamers and balloons and smiling faces, piles of pancakes and sausage and bacon and eggs, and a big cake on the counter. 

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” came a shout from everyone in the kitchen, and even though he missed his family, he smiled. 

***

“I found him! He’s right here in Virginia!” Garcia yelped and Emily hunched over to peer at the screen. “He was adopted last year by a really nice couple from Manassas…”

“Manassas? Isn’t that…”

“Okay. Ew. No. Stop. This whole thing is just TOO MUCH Emily. I can’t connect anymore dots. I can’t look at another part of Hotch’s life that scumbag has somehow managed to worm his way into.” Penelope looked at the sweet little boy with his dark eyes and his dark hair on the screen and she sighed. She didn’t know what to do. This boy looked truly happy, smiling, the family looked sweet. They couldn’t just take him out of that life and give him to a woman who belonged in prison just to save their friend. 

“What do we do?” Penelope asked, and Emily sighed. 

“I have an idea, but it’s really going to suck.” 

***

“Sue, we found Jacob. His name is Owen now, and he lives here in Virginia with a very nice family. His mother is a teacher and his father runs a dog grooming business out of their home. We can’t remove him from that home for you, but we have reached out to his family and asked if they would be willing to let you have visitation so long as you agreed to a few ground rules. They are open to the idea.”

“No, I want my son back,” Sue said, leaning forward in her chair toward Emily. Emily didn’t budge. If Sue thought she could intimidate Emily, she thought wrong. 

“You have no legal right to him, you signed that away three years ago. I understand you want a relationship with your son and I’m here telling you how you get that.” 

“It’s not good enough! I want my baby!” There it was, the unchecked rage. Emily smiled. She’d read the file, seen the footage of Sue hitting Aaron, and here it was again. She would have to do better to make Sue really squirm, to give something up for free. 

“Then how about I arrest you for kidnapping? If you go to prison again, there is no way your son’s family is going to let you have anything to do with him. This is your only option.”

Sue was silent, she was fuming, she picked at the scar on her palm, picked until she made her skin bleed. From outside the room, JJ watched, arms folded over her chest, waiting to make the next move. She hoped Sue would just slip up, say something, maybe just be smart and take the deal but she just sat there silently fuming. Both women were a little disappointed, Sue seemed to have found a way to control herself, at least some, during her stay in prison. 

“You tell us what we need to know, we’ll arrange for you to meet your son.”

“I want Ian out of prison,” Sue said finally. Her demeanor had suddenly changed, as if she was an entirely new person. Her voice was sweet, calm, her accent was thick. “You get him out and we can start a new family. Then I’ll give you what you want.”

“Sue…” Emily said, shooting JJ a look of total exasperation through the glass. “I don’t know if I can promise that.”

“I know your friend is innocent and you’ll never prove it without me. You could find his son pretty easy if you pulled your heads out of your asses and paid attention, but you’ll never be able to prove Agent Hotchner didn’t kill those people. Might as well get used to the idea of visiting him behind bars for the rest of his life. Might not be long, though.” 

Emily got up and walked out of the room without another word, leaving Sue alone again picking at her palm. She looked at JJ, her eyes wide, waiting on her friend to give her direction. 

“What do you think, Acting Unit Chief? I can’t make any of these calls, I’m just a tourist.”

“What other choice do we have? What would Hotch do?”

“He would try to find any loophole he could,” Emily said, keeping her voice low, too low for the nearby guards to hear. “And if there wasn’t one, he would take care of it by any means necessary. You know that. We owe him that much, don’t we?” 

“I have an idea.” It was quick, but JJ left Emily standing there in the hallway and rushed into the room with Sue. She didn’t bother to sit down, she just leaned against the table and stared down at Sue, arms folded across her chest. She was acutely aware that she was making a deal with the devil, that what she was about to do wasn’t right, but neither was what was happening to Hotch and Jack. None of it was right. “Here’s our final offer. We’ll get you supervised visitation with your son in return for Jack’s whereabouts. If you want Ian Little out of prison, you’re going to have to give us something irrefutable so that we know you can be trusted. You have a history, Sue. We need to know you’re telling the truth before we offer you any further deals.” 

“Okay, fine. Irrefutable? What a big fancy word from the big city girl. Did the M.E. ever tell you how those people died?”

“The reports listed blunt force trauma as the cause of death in each case, they all…” and she was putting it together now. Her eyes went wide and she felt like she’d been punched in the gut. How had they missed it? “There were no autopsies requested.” 

“Funny old world, huh?”

***

“Autopsies? So she’s saying that they might have already been dead when the blunt force trauma occurred?” Dave asked, pacing back and forth beside his car. He’d just left the prison, left Aaron inside again. The chilly October air cooled him, calmed his racing pulse. “We need to take care of this fast. His trial starts next week and I don’t think they’ll let us push it back again, we’re already on borrowed time. If he goes to trial, he’s finished. He would rather die in prison than see his life put under the microscope for an audience, he’s not cooperating with the legal team anymore.”

“But he’s innocent. He knows that right?” JJ’s voice was frantic as she watched Garcia put together the pieces of Jack’s whereabouts from the files in his computer, breadcrumbs she would never have seen until knowing Sue Walsh was involved. Garcia bounced up and down in her chair, pointing excitedly at her screen – there was a letter written in code. If she could get Reid to break the code, they would have their first solid lead. She rushed off, leaving JJ in her office alone, head spinning. 

“I’m not so sure. Get me proof. Make the deal, request the autopsies, just get proof.” Dave hung up after that and stalked back into the prison, hoping to get another few minutes with his friend. He tossed his belongings into the bucket, submitted to the metal detectors and the pat downs, and demanded to see the Warden. 

***

“What do you think of that story I told you earlier?” Perotta asked, sitting with his back against the bars of his cell only a few feet away from Aaron doing the same. Aaron sighed. 

“I think I should start billing my hours,” he replied, desperately trying to wiggle his finger inside his cast, to reach the itch. It just hurt, pressing against his swollen hand, but he couldn’t stop. 

“You think if I told a judge that story, they’d let me out? I mean, that’s what your lawyers are going for right? Poor Agent Hotchner got slapped around a little by his daddy so whatever he did was justified.” Perotta smiled, it was a crooked, mean smile. Aaron couldn’t see him but he knew exactly what he looked like. He felt his stomach twist angrily and he gritted his teeth – he was finding it more and more difficult to remain silent, to just keep to himself. He knew that’s what Perotta was after. 

“I’m not interested in comparing fathers,” Aaron said, finally, shifting his hips on the concrete. His legs were falling asleep sitting on the floor like that, but he didn’t mind, the tingling in his toes distracted him from the itch on his arm.


	11. Chapter 11

“This is the place?” JJ asked, standing at the end of a long dirt road descending straight into a thicket of trees. They couldn’t see the end of the road, couldn’t see any signs of life, but it was exactly what Sue had described. 

“It’s giving me the creeps,” Emily replied, patting the gun at her hip, just to make sure. “God I hope she’s telling the truth. If I have to survive some kind of Deliverance bullshit, I will kill her with my bare hands.”

“I’ll hide the body,” JJ smiled, nudging Emily with her elbow playfully. They laughed a little before hopping back into the SUV with Spencer and telling him to drive slowly down the road. The tires kicked up a cloud of dust as they made their way down the winding path, branches and bushes scraping against the doors like angry fingernails on chalkboards. As they moved forward, the trees became thicker, less sunlight made its way through and Spencer almost turned on his headlights before they broke out into a clearing. In the center of the clearing was a big old house that looked like it was smiling, children playing out in the front yard on a homemade swing set. Emily squinted and thought she could make out Jack’s figure sitting on the steps, hugging a backpack, talking to another boy about his age. Everyone in the yard stopped, froze when they saw the SUV approach. 

“That’s…a lot…of kids…” JJ muttered, and she’d just given words to what they’d all been thinking. There had to be ten children in the yard. “What is this place?”

“I knew this whole thing was going to suck,” Emily groaned, opening her door as the SUV rolled to a stop. The three of them walked shoulder to shoulder toward the house, and as they approached, Emily noticed that Jack looked up and a sudden flash of recognition blanketed his features. It took him only seconds before he jumped off of the steps and rushed toward them, nearly knocked JJ over as he wrapped himself around her first, then Spencer, and finally Emily. 

“You came for me!” he cried, squeezing himself so tight around Emily’s waist. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry…” he was crying now, she could feel the tears soaking through her shirt and she circled him in her arms and just let him cry. JJ and Spencer moved forward, approaching the house, looking for the adults. They were nearly to the porch, all of the children still frozen and staring but now JJ thought that they all looked expectant, hopeful, jealous even. 

“Who are you? You’re trespassing…” a woman said, stepping out into the sunlight, with a man behind her brandishing a rifle at his hip. “You leave our kids alone. They’re here legally, they’re ours.” 

“Not that one,” JJ indicated, pointing at Jack. “That one was taken from his home and brought here against his will.” 

“No, no no no, we were told…” she began, but when JJ and Spencer pulled out their credentials she stopped. “We run a home for children who are deemed unadoptable by their agencies, we take them and give them a home. We’re not doing anything wrong. That girl, she told us he was from a home in Virginia, his mother was murdered and his father was a murderer and he…”

“You were lied to, Ma'am. His father is an FBI Agent and has been searching for him for weeks now. We’re going to take him with us, he’s going home. We’re sorry you were mixed up in this, but you have no legal right to keep him.”

“I understand. I’m sorry Jack!” she called, waving at him. “We would have loved you too!” JJ and Spencer slipped their credentials back into their pockets and turned around, trying to avoid the gazes of all of the other children as they walked away. When they reached Emily and Jack, the four of them made for the SUV as quickly as they could. 

“We’re definitely having Garcia check this place out, right?” Emily asked through gritted teeth, waiting for Jack to get into the car. JJ nodded vehemently, slipping into the passenger seat.

“As soon as we have reception.” 

Jack cried for nearly the entire ride back to the air strip. He told them everything he saw on his computer, all of the horrible things he learned about his father, all of the horrible things done to his father by his grandparents. Things Spencer and JJ and Emily didn’t know, never wanted to know. He couldn’t stop himself, and they let him pour it out, he had no one he could trust to talk to and he was hurting but they all felt a deep sense of things being very, very wrong as he spoke. 

“Why would he lie to me? He told me that my granddad was…” Jack started, but Spencer couldn’t let it go on further. He’d heard more than enough and he couldn’t listen to one more second of it, one more awful thing. 

“Jack, the human brain is a complicated thing. It has an incredible capacity to catalog and store information on all kinds of subjects, some useful and some not. You know how your computer has a firewall? To protect it from hackers and viruses and other bad things? Your brain has some very similar functions, and…your father’s firewalls are protecting him from the really bad things that happened to him. And those firewalls were protecting you, too.”

Jack wiped the tears from his cheeks and thought about what Spencer had said, really thought about it. He hadn’t considered any of that, didn’t have the capacity to really understand it, but it felt right. It made him feel comfortable again. Like his dad was safe again.

“I was just scared. If all of that happened to him…would he do it to me, too?”

“Oh Jack,” JJ started, but Spencer cut her off. He knew what Jack needed, and it was just simple, cold facts. 

“I didn’t know any of that about your dad either and I’ve known him longer than you have. In fact, none of us did. You know what that tells me? It tells me he’s worked very, very hard to leave that part of his life behind. Not to hide it from us, but to rise above it, to say it isn’t who he is. It tells me that he’s worked every single day of his life not to do what his parents did. Your dad broke the cycle, Jack. Terrible things happened to him, but those things are not who he is. He’s just your dad, the guy who reads those long boring law books for fun, and makes you do all of your homework, who coaches your soccer team even though he’s exhausted and would love to spend a day relaxing on the couch, who never misses a Halloween. Same dad he’s always been, it’s just now…now you are a keeper of his secrets, Jack. Secrets that hurt him. I know you never asked for that, but you can handle it. You can protect him, right?” 

“Protect my dad?” Jack asked, looking desperately around the car. JJ smiled at him and nodded.

“It’s what family does. We protect each other. We’ll help you, we’re keepers of those secrets now too. We’re a team, okay?”

“Okay…” Jack nodded, and they all smiled at him, trying to cheer his spirits. The rest of the ride back to the airstrip was lighter, he told them about the birthday party that family had thrown for him, how good the cake was, that they’d even bought him presents but he left them all at the house. The other kids could have them, all he’d needed was his backpack which he hadn’t let out of his hands since the day he walked out on Jessica. 

***

“Jack is home,” Jessica said softly, staring at Aaron for the first time in a month. He didn’t look that different, not really. She’d seen him at his worst, known him in his darkest hours, held his hand through times when she was worried he wasn’t going to take another breath. “Derek is with him now, they’re having a man to man. He’s so good with kids.” Aaron nodded, biting into his lip to keep himself from crying. It wouldn’t do him any good with the other inmates in the room to be seen like that when he was already at the top of every shit list in the place. 

“He’s okay?” he asked, his voice choked and raw. “They didn’t hurt him?”

“Not a hair on his head. He’s fine. I mean, he’s got a lot on his mind…but he’ll be okay. Even better once he has you back.”

“He doesn’t want me back.” Aaron knew it, because it would be exactly how he’d feel. He knew Jack felt betrayed, suspicious, heartbroken. Trust was earned, and he knew that the trust Jack had in him was shattered. Jessica just rolled her eyes, she wasn’t going to give in to his self-loathing, she never did. 

“Stop it,” she snapped, leaning forward. “You are everything to that kid. Everything. I don’t care if you’re too stupid to understand it, but you need to accept it. Stop with the self-pity crap now, Aaron, it’s not doing you any good. Your team is close to getting you out of here, and then…” she stopped, because she knew what came next, but they weren’t telling Aaron yet. Better to save it for him on the outside, because he may try to do something stupid to stay inside if he knew. No, the and then would wait. She didn’t mind, she was a patient person, and she wasn’t eager to be the one to tell him. “And then things go back to how they were.” She was lying, but not entirely. 

“I don’t…” he started, but he saw the look on her face, dangerous and a little scary and he stopped.

“Stop. We’re going throw your son a birthday party and invite all of your team over and you are going to eat cake and smile, Aaron Hotchner. Do you understand me?” 

“Yes, ma’am.”

***

“My dad took me on a camping trip when I was thirteen,” Aaron said softly, his back against the bars of his cell. He knew Perotta was listening. He was always listening. “It had been planned for months, us and a few of his buddies and their kids. My brother was only three so he stayed home with mom, it was just me and my dad. I was so excited for it.” 

“And it was magical I take it?”

“I got some kind of bacterial infection in my stomach, throwing up for a week beforehand. Nothing helped, the antibiotics made me sick too. Just like now, I guess. But he didn’t want to miss that trip, and neither did I so we went anyway and I had to sit in the bed of the truck with a bucket to puke into because he didn’t want me to make a mess in the cab.”

“Poor baby.” 

Aaron rolled his eyes. He’d gotten to know Perotta well in their time as neighbors, and he’d realized that Perotta had no vested interest in carrying out Peter Lewis’ intentions. Didn’t pay him enough, Aaron figured. He seemed to want nothing more than to sit and swap bad dad stories, but Aaron hadn’t taken the bait. Now that he knew Jack was home and safe, he felt lighter, thought he’d throw the man a bone. “We set up the tent, but my dad threw a tarp at me and said he didn’t want me puking in the tent so I’d have to find a place to set up the tarp in the trees. So long as I was sick, I had to sleep in the dirt. I was upset but it wasn’t so bad, I’d done it in Boy Scouts, I knew how to tarp camp. I couldn’t blame him, he was right wasn’t he? Who wants puke inside of a tent? It would have ruined the whole trip.” 

“Sure, he was right.” 

“I found a nice flat spot to put my tarp and I lit my own little fire to keep warm. I listened to them telling stories and drinking around the big fire, my friends were roasting marshmallows, and I lay there in my sleeping bag throwing up, feeling miserable but I was camping with my dad so it was still good. Just kept hoping I’d feel better in the morning. I prayed for a miracle.”

“And did you get it?”

“My miracle was that when I woke up in the morning, the camp site was empty. They’d all decided to go fishing on the lake and left me there alone. Just me and the tents all day. And when they came back with all of their fish and all of their stories, I tried to be happy with them. Said I understood. And they did it to me again the next morning. I spent the whole trip alone, sick. My sleeping bag was soaked by the time we went home because it had rained and my tarp had holes in it.”

Perotta yawned. Aaron couldn’t tell if it was real or just for dramatic effect, either way he thought it was funny. “What’s the moral of the story? I’m tired.”

“I was still glad I went, because I was there with my dad and he was happy. I still have that memory and it’s not a great one, but it’s not a terrible one. I could focus on how bad I felt…I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, spent most of my summer sick in bed, it was a bad time for me. Maybe the really awful things he did to me allowed me to see that trip for something better than it was, I don’t know. I do know that I got to watch a family of raccoons pick through my vomit on the first night just a few feet away from my face. Not many people can claim that kind of up close nature experience.”

“How heartwarming. Thank you for sharing. Maybe they’ll make a Disney movie out of it someday and the raccoons will talk.” Perotta smiled, Aaron could hear it in his demeanor. It wasn’t a real smile, a happy smile, it was something altogether different. Like a cat dipping its paw into a goldfish bowl. Aaron slid up the bars to standing and pushed himself wearily along the wall of his cell, back to his bed on legs that were barely supporting him. He’d just finished his second round of antibiotics and the infection looked like it might have finally met its match, but he hadn’t been out of his cell in so long, hadn’t eaten a real meal in longer than he could remember, and just wanted desperately to see some sunlight. 

“Goodnight, Vincent. You’re welcome to kill me anytime you like, you know where I live.” This time Aaron smiled, because he knew Perotta had no intention of killing him. He’d been saying that every night since he figured it out. Peter Lewis had misjudged him. All Perotta wanted was to be out of maximum security for a time, to eat surrounded by people (even if he hated them all and would have loved to kill every one of them, for the right price), and to talk to Agent Hotchner again after all these years. Of course, if Lewis had paid him enough he might have changed his mind, but that wasn’t the case. Scales looked over at Aaron, watched as he slowly eased himself down onto his bed and slid into his blankets, stifling the grunts and groans of a man suffering through what felt like eternal pain. 

“You’re a real piece of work, Law Man,” he said softly. Aaron chuckled.

“Suppose so.” 

***

It took nearly two weeks for the autopsies on each victim to be completed, some of the families were hesitant to sign off on them in the first place. Dave couldn’t blame them, they wanted closure and peace, and as long as Aaron was in prison they had it. The request for the autopsies allowed them to push the trial back again, which was all Dave had allowed himself to hope for. The autopsies on each of them showed that they all died from heart failure, and the M.E. granted that each of them had been dead at least a full day, if not longer, prior to the blunt force trauma. When presented with this information, Dave began the proceedings to try and get Ian Little released from prison in Mississippi, as a show of good faith. He hated making deals with these people, but it was the unfortunate and sick way the justice system worked sometimes. In order to prove an innocent man innocent, they would have to let a guilty man walk free. 

It didn’t take long to get the papers granting Ian early parole, and Dave took them straight away to where Sue was being held on kidnapping charges so she didn’t run. She didn’t mind, she’d consented to the whole thing. 

“Two weeks,” Dave said, slapping the papers up against the bars. “He’ll be released on parole in two weeks. You owe me a statement, and I’d better be able to use it or this all goes away and you both stay locked up. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

He had the guards move her to the interrogation room, and set a piece of paper in front of her. “Start writing. Then you’re going to read me every word.” 

It took her two pages to write everything she she needed to say, but at the end of it she signed her name and began reading it aloud, right into the tape recorder set in the middle of the table. Dave liked to work old school, wouldn’t use anything digital for something this important. He wanted his hard copies. Digital was something Peter Lewis could manipulate, somehow, but not this. 

“Peter Lewis met me outside of prison, when I was released. He said he knew how to get my family back, I just needed to help him with a problem first. I remembered Agent Hotchner from years ago, he’s the one that put me in prison, that asshole. He used an asthma inhaler to spray something in those people’s faces, each of the victims, and then he used a needle to inject more drugs into them. They all died right away, it looked awful, like they couldn’t breathe and their eyes bulged out of their heads and then they were gone. He hid them all over town, and I don’t know how he got Agent Hotchner but he did. Same spray, same drugs, but I watched and he told Agent Hotchner that it was a man named George Foyet on the ground, and he lost his mind. I’ve never been so scared. He punched those people so hard their faces weren’t faces anymore…he did three of them, I don’t know who did the other two. He hurt his hands really bad. I don’t know what this George Foyet did to him, but he obviously hates that guy. I wouldn’t wanna be him.”

Dave stopped the recording and sighed. “George Foyet murdered Agent Hotchner’s wife,” he said softly, staring Sue in the eye. She flinched, maybe the first real human reaction he’d seen out of her yet. 

“I’m sorry. That’s awful. Look is that enough? He didn’t kill those people. I mean, yeah, he punched the shit out of them but he didn’t kill them. He wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for those drugs.” 

“Is this how Lewis intended things to go? Were you supposed to tell us?”

“No. He told me he had no intention of getting my family back, once I dropped Jack off. Called me trailer trash, said I belonged behind bars with Ian. I decided to do this on my own. Fuck his stupid plan.” 

***

Sue’s testimony caused some problems for both legal teams, but ultimately was proven to be true. Aaron was released from prison, and though he had many offers, was picked up by Dave. He stood outside of the prison with his belongings in his arms, wearing clothing Dave had bought brand new for him. They were stiff and felt expensive, but he appreciated that they weren’t prison blues. When Dave pulled up, the sight of Aaron standing there, tall and silhouetted against the afternoon sunlight brought tears to his eyes. He jumped out of the car and rushed over to his friend, wrapping him in a hug that was too tight and lasted too long and he didn’t care about any of it. Aaron leaned in, hugged back, felt the ground shift a little under his feet. They walked to the car still attached to one another, Dave not ready to let Aaron go, lest he disappear and find that it was all a dream. Into his car they slid, and away from the prison they drove as fast as Dave could force his car to move. 

“Why do you look so sad?” Aaron asked as they pulled out onto the highway, headed back to D.C. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

Dave sighed and blinked away the tears that were threatening to spill. “I…” he began, clearing his throat. “Aaron, Peter Lewis is still out there. Sue’s testimony freed you but he’s still out there, and he knows everything about your life. He’s not done. You and your family are not safe. I already spoke with Jessica…the rest of the team doesn’t know yet, but the Bureau has made the decision that in order to keep you and your family safe, they want to put you all into witness protection.”

“All?” Aaron asked, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes. The hits just kept coming. He should have known he wasn’t just getting out and heading straight to a birthday party. It was so much more than a birthday party, and now he realized what Jessica had been trying to say. He knew she meant more than she let on, he could read her, he’d always been able to read her, she couldn’t hide from him…he was just so self-absorbed that he didn’t see it this time. He sank down into the seat and closed his eyes, drawing a long, shaky breath. 

“Jessica and Roy would need to go too. They’re not safe. If we put you and Jack somewhere, he could easily get you to come back to save either of them. You all have to go together.” 

“So this birthday party…”

“There will be a US Marshall at my home at 6pm. You have six hours to smile, eat cake, and have a good time with all of us. I’m sorry Aaron, but it’s the only way to keep you safe. You can refuse, of course, but…”

“No. I can’t. Not this time, Dave. I have to make the right decision this time.” 

Dave’s house was decked out with every birthday banner and balloon and streamer that the party stores in the area carried. Penelope and Derek had conspired to make his home unrecognizable. There was confetti that made Dave’s insides twist with rage, glitter he’d never get out of his sofa, and more food than they could eat in a week spread out in every available space. Aaron couldn’t believe his eyes. The moment he saw Jack, his breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t imagined it would be this hard to look at his son, but the boy looked different somehow. Older, maybe. And maybe he looked different too – he’d lost more than ten pounds, his arm was going to be in its cast for at least another few weeks, and he knew his hair needed a cut. They both looked a little worse for the wear, but when Jack saw his dad, he rushed to him and wrapped him in a hug and told him he loved him and squeezed him so tight that Aaron forgot all the rest. He wondered if everyone here knew this was the last time they’d be together like this, but by the look on Penelope’s face he didn’t think so…she was an open book, and she looked positively gleeful, she couldn’t possibly know. Derek, though, the way he looked at Aaron…he knew. Aaron could see it in his eyes, he could read Derek easier than almost anyone. He was subtle, the changes in his demeanor were so small that they were easy to miss but Aaron had made it his personal mission to understand every twitch of an eyebrow, every flash in his eyes. 

“Hey man, can we talk?” Derek asked, approaching him once Jack was distracted by a pile of gifts. Aaron nodded and slipped away with Derek into the next room. “Rossi told me what they’re doing. I think Emily knows, too, but we’re the only ones. He wanted to tell the team tonight. You good with this?”

“I don’t think I have a choice,” Aaron sighed, leaning against the wall. “I have a history of making the wrong decision, and everything in me says to fight it, to hunt him myself…so I think that means I shouldn’t fight it. Not this time.” 

“For what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right call,” Derek said, resting his hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “It was hard for me to leave the BAU, but family…that kid of yours…you’re doing the right thing. This job has taken enough from you.” 

Aaron nodded. He was still trying to convince himself it was the right thing to do, because he didn’t know who he was if he wasn’t SSA Hotchner. And that was it, his entire identity was wrapped up in being Hotch, he wasn’t sure he could be Aaron full time. But he had to try. Derek pulled him into a hug, a tight hug, and Aaron didn’t think he’d ever felt so safe, so loved in his entire life. This was a friend to end all friends, someone who he’d spent the greater part of his career butting heads with, bouncing ideas off of, competing with. He asked Derek to get in touch with Sean, tell him he was sorry for being such a shit brother, and Derek agreed to at least part of that but he would probably ad lib the rest. Aaron didn’t mind. 

“Maybe I’ll run into you out there. Guess I make a pretty convincing nurse…maybe I’ve got a new career path ahead of me.” 

When Dave made the announcement, the mood changed instantly. Penelope cried. JJ held her, but she cried too – and maybe she was crying for Aaron leaving, but maybe she was also crying because she was going to be stuck in his job and as nice as a promotion was, she’d never wanted his job…she wanted him to have his job. She told him he could have his job back when Peter Lewis was dead and buried, but they both knew that wasn’t how it worked. Emily told him she hoped maybe he’d find his way to London someday, and he told her she should consider moving back because the BAU could use her specific brand of chaos, and JJ could use her support. Spencer had a million things to say and couldn’t put them out there fast enough and Aaron couldn’t understand any of it, but he listened as intently as he could anyway because he knew it was all important to his friend to get out. He didn’t know how he was going to leave this party, leave them all behind. 

“It’s time,” Dave said, softly, pulling Aaron away from the team. “Let me walk you out. It’s my turn to say goodbye.” Jack was already waiting in the car, and they had to stop by Jessica’s to pick up her and Roy. The team were inside crying, and outside he and Dave were pretending they weren’t ready to do the same. As Aaron looked at Dave, saw the way his hair was graying around the edges, he was struck with the sudden and very overwhelming realization that he may never see his friend again. He was going to miss moments, big ones and small ones, the birth of children and weddings and normal everyday moments. He would never have a scotch on his couch after a hard day with Emily and Dave again. He would probably never see a wishing troll again, or be popped in the face by physics magic. He was going to miss watching Dave’s hair go white, miss JJ transitioning into Unit Chief in a way that would make him proud and jealous, Jack would miss his friends. They would never get any of this time back. But his family would be in tact, he could finally say he was making the right call, he was keeping Roy and Jessica safe where he couldn’t do the same for Haley. He was keeping Jack safe. The only thing he’d ever wanted. 

“We’ll catch him, Aaron,” Dave said softly, pulling Aaron in for a hug. Aaron could feel his breath hot and soft against his ear, he could feel the warm wet feeling as their tears met. “And don’t worry, I’ll remember everything about you in ten years. We all will.”


End file.
